Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (50 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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Ever original, Lévi-Strauss continually wrong-footed his interlocutors, dashing the expectations that one would have for a leading French intellectual and critic of the West. In an interview in
La Nouvelle critique
in 1973 he shied away from taking a position on the Vietnam War, saying that the indigenous Montagnards were under just as much threat from the North as the South. He would later extend the argument, reassessing his earlier support for decolonization on the grounds that indigenous peoples were often worse off under newly independent regimes.
28
In May 1976, giving testimony before an Assemblée nationale law reform committee, he argued that the idea of liberty was completely relative. He attacked the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as irrelevant to the developing world, adding, referring to life in totalitarian states: “To undergo a regime of forced labour, food rationing, and thought control might even appear as a liberation to people deprived of everything.”
29
Politically, his wartime Gaullist allegiance remained intact, and he would rejoice each time the conservatives won power. And in 1980 he opposed the election of the first woman into the Académie française, novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, saying that it ran against centuries of tradition.
La Nouvelle critique
in 1973 he shied away from taking a position on the Vietnam War, saying that the indigenous Montagnards were under just as much threat from the North as the South. He would later extend the argument, reassessing his earlier support for decolonization on the grounds that indigenous peoples were often worse off under newly independent regimes.
28
In May 1976, giving testimony before an Assemblée nationale law reform committee, he argued that the idea of liberty was completely relative. He attacked the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as irrelevant to the developing world, adding, referring to life in totalitarian states: “To undergo a regime of forced labour, food rationing, and thought control might even appear as a liberation to people deprived of everything.”
29
Politically, his wartime Gaullist allegiance remained intact, and he would rejoice each time the conservatives won power. And in 1980 he opposed the election of the first woman into the Académie française, novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, saying that it ran against centuries of tradition.
Lévi-Strauss was losing touch with late-twentieth-century France. By the end of the 1970s, the backwash of decolonization was becoming more and more visible on Paris’s street corners, in its shops and restaurants, changing the face of the city. The multiculturalism that had so fascinated him as a younger man in wartime New York now seemed like a threat to his own culture. Lévi-Strauss’s neighborhood, the sixteenth arrondissement, had been prey to different forces, the gentrification that had wiped out the artist studios and
brocantes
of Lévi-Strauss’s youth. In the mid-1950s, Lévi-Strauss had already been lamenting its demise in the pages of
Tristes Tropiques
: “Not long ago the sixteenth arrondissement was resplendent, but now its bright blooms are obscured by the sprouting of office blocks and apartment buildings which are gradually making it indistinguishable from the Parisian
banlieue
.” By the 1980s, he was damning—“Now the area bores me,” he told Didier Eribon.
30
Like his father before him, he deliberately withdrew into a hallowed past, into a France that no longer existed or, indeed, had ever existed.
brocantes
of Lévi-Strauss’s youth. In the mid-1950s, Lévi-Strauss had already been lamenting its demise in the pages of
Tristes Tropiques
: “Not long ago the sixteenth arrondissement was resplendent, but now its bright blooms are obscured by the sprouting of office blocks and apartment buildings which are gradually making it indistinguishable from the Parisian
banlieue
.” By the 1980s, he was damning—“Now the area bores me,” he told Didier Eribon.
30
Like his father before him, he deliberately withdrew into a hallowed past, into a France that no longer existed or, indeed, had ever existed.
This sense of withdrawal was echoed in his progressive retreat from intellectual debate. In 1974 Lévi-Strauss took part in a historic meeting of the age’s intellectual giants, which has since become a landmark event in the cognitive sciences. The American anthropologist Scott Atran, then a graduate student at Columbia University in his early twenties, had the chutzpah to bring together an extraordinary collection of thinkers, from linguist Noam Chomsky to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, from anthropologist Gregory Bateson to biologist Jacques Monod, along with Lévi-Strauss himself. Over the course of several days, in the atmospheric surroundings of the Abbaye de Royaumont, a thirteenth-century Cistercian abbey on the outskirts of Paris, these great minds debated the big questions that Lévi-Strauss had devoted his life to—the relationships between language, culture and the mind, rapprochements between philosophy and cognition, the search for human universals.
The debate was vigorous and stimulating, with Chomsky, then in his prime, in characteristic combative form, leading discussions on a range of topics and rebutting critics. But unlike at that other milestone in the cognitive revolution, the Bloomington conference in Indiana two decades earlier, Lévi-Strauss was strangely silent. “Lévi-Strauss sat patiently and said nothing as others spoke their piece or pontificated, or pleaded and shouted their oppositions,” remembered Atran. “On the way to our last lunch, Noam Chomsky . . . walked up to Lévi-Strauss and said in a shy sort of way, ‘Perhaps you remember me, when I sat in on your class at Harvard with Roman Jakobson?’ Lévi-Strauss looked at Chomsky and said, ‘I’m sorry, but no.’ Those were the only words he would utter in the conference room.” Much of the time he spent doodling, and his drawings—“of cats and other real and fantastical animals”—which he left behind on his desk, were fiercely fought over. The pathos of Atran’s recollections is poignant. Lévi-Strauss’s mind was as agile as ever when taking apart yet another set of Amerindian myths, but it seems that by his mid-sixties fresh intellectual perspectives were beyond him. Despite his subdued participation, he later lauded the Abbaye de Royaumont talks as the most important intellectual event of the second half of the twentieth century, but this fit into Lévi-Strauss’s lifelong habit of flattering, but never truly engaging with, the work of his contemporaries.
Intellectually isolated, Lévi-Strauss’s conservative instincts toward the arts were also hardening. Contemporary culture meant little to him. He disliked modern theater and rarely went to the cinema, preferring to watch old tapes of Hitchcock and Mizoguchi films at home. By retirement, his interest in art and music of the twentieth century had virtually fallen away as his devotion to nineteenth-century opera and painting deepened. The modern novel was dead, although in one concession to popular culture Lévi-Strauss liked reading American crime fiction—Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series.
31
As for rock bands and comics, “they don’t hold any attraction for me,” he said in the 1980s, “and that’s an understatement!” He could worship the rawest indigenous artifacts, but maintained strict divisions between high and low culture in his own society. “To idolise the ‘rock culture’ or the ‘comic strip culture’ is to distort one meaning of culture for the benefit of another, to perpetrate a kind of intellectual swindle.”
32
31
As for rock bands and comics, “they don’t hold any attraction for me,” he said in the 1980s, “and that’s an understatement!” He could worship the rawest indigenous artifacts, but maintained strict divisions between high and low culture in his own society. “To idolise the ‘rock culture’ or the ‘comic strip culture’ is to distort one meaning of culture for the benefit of another, to perpetrate a kind of intellectual swindle.”
32
And yet Lévi-Strauss still had a kind of radical appeal. Strands of his thought resonated with the Left, with students and academics. Through
Race et histoire
and
Tristes Tropiques
, Lévi-Strauss had brought twentieth-century anthropology’s central idea—that all mankind shared a fundamental psychological unity—to a wide audience. “Whatever man is today,” Lévi-Strauss told
Time
magazine, “man already was.” It was a powerful message, one with potentially revolutionary implications for oppressed groups the world over. Although not involved politically in the defense of indigenous peoples, Lévi-Strauss did not shy away from making strong statements in the media, coruscating the West’s (and by implication anthropology’s) crimes, at a time when this line was still fresh and controversial. “It is because we have killed, exploited them for centuries that it was possible for us to look at them as mere things,” he told George Steiner in the BBC interview in the mid-1960s. “We can study them as objects, because we have treated them as objects. There is no doubt that anthropology is the daughter of this era of violence.”
33
He also preempted the environmental movement with his bleak prognoses for the future of the planet, beginning with his laments in
Tristes Tropiques
and continuing in his discourse on overpopulation and mankind’s pillage of nature.
Race et histoire
and
Tristes Tropiques
, Lévi-Strauss had brought twentieth-century anthropology’s central idea—that all mankind shared a fundamental psychological unity—to a wide audience. “Whatever man is today,” Lévi-Strauss told
Time
magazine, “man already was.” It was a powerful message, one with potentially revolutionary implications for oppressed groups the world over. Although not involved politically in the defense of indigenous peoples, Lévi-Strauss did not shy away from making strong statements in the media, coruscating the West’s (and by implication anthropology’s) crimes, at a time when this line was still fresh and controversial. “It is because we have killed, exploited them for centuries that it was possible for us to look at them as mere things,” he told George Steiner in the BBC interview in the mid-1960s. “We can study them as objects, because we have treated them as objects. There is no doubt that anthropology is the daughter of this era of violence.”
33
He also preempted the environmental movement with his bleak prognoses for the future of the planet, beginning with his laments in
Tristes Tropiques
and continuing in his discourse on overpopulation and mankind’s pillage of nature.
The evocative titles and the covers of his books gave off a countercultural charge. The cover of Plon’s reissue of
Tristes Tropiques
, for instance, substituted one of Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork images for what had previously been an abstract drawing of a tattooed Caduveo woman. The new picture featured what looked like a teenage Nambikwara girl—although it is in fact a boy with long ruffled hair and full lips—wearing an elegant straw ornament piercing the nose. His head tipped back, his eyes glazed, he stares vacantly into the camera lens. Lévi-Strauss was unhappy with the change, but the image was potent. It spoke of youth and exoticism; it hinted at the erotic, striking a chord with the cultural upheaval of the times. Lévi-Strauss’s classic, along with the rest of Plon’s Terre humaine series, moved into the 1970s with a renewed appeal.
Tristes Tropiques
, for instance, substituted one of Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork images for what had previously been an abstract drawing of a tattooed Caduveo woman. The new picture featured what looked like a teenage Nambikwara girl—although it is in fact a boy with long ruffled hair and full lips—wearing an elegant straw ornament piercing the nose. His head tipped back, his eyes glazed, he stares vacantly into the camera lens. Lévi-Strauss was unhappy with the change, but the image was potent. It spoke of youth and exoticism; it hinted at the erotic, striking a chord with the cultural upheaval of the times. Lévi-Strauss’s classic, along with the rest of Plon’s Terre humaine series, moved into the 1970s with a renewed appeal.
IN
L’HOMME NU
Lévi-Strauss had likened the study of American mythology to the weaving of giant fabric—a looping back and forth, a joining up of different-colored threads, in the hope of achieving a textural consistency. Long after finishing off the quartet, Lévi-Strauss continued his stitching and darning in his efforts to “reinforce weak spots,” as he had put it, so that “the tiniest details, however gratuitous, bizarre, and even absurd they may have seemed at the beginning, acquire both meaning and function.” The result was what he called his
petits mythologiques
, which appeared between 1975 and 1991, a collection of codas to his massive tetralogy. In
La Voie des masques
(1975),
La Potière jalouse
(1985) and
Histoire de Lynx
(1991) Lévi-Strauss not only filled gaps left in the
Mythologiques
, but integrated earlier work into the myth project.
L’HOMME NU
Lévi-Strauss had likened the study of American mythology to the weaving of giant fabric—a looping back and forth, a joining up of different-colored threads, in the hope of achieving a textural consistency. Long after finishing off the quartet, Lévi-Strauss continued his stitching and darning in his efforts to “reinforce weak spots,” as he had put it, so that “the tiniest details, however gratuitous, bizarre, and even absurd they may have seemed at the beginning, acquire both meaning and function.” The result was what he called his
petits mythologiques
, which appeared between 1975 and 1991, a collection of codas to his massive tetralogy. In
La Voie des masques
(1975),
La Potière jalouse
(1985) and
Histoire de Lynx
(1991) Lévi-Strauss not only filled gaps left in the
Mythologiques
, but integrated earlier work into the myth project.
La Voie des masques
(the
voie
[way] echoing
voix
[voice]—another untranslatable title that was rendered
The Way of the Masks
in English), returned to one of Lévi-Strauss’s favorite haunts while in exile, the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In among the totem poles were the rows of Northwest Coast Indian masks that Franz Boas had curated at the end of the nineteenth century. Carved in wood and painted in primary colors, the masks’ bulging eyes, protruding tongues, hooked noses and O-shaped mouths had long interested Lévi-Strauss aesthetically. From the theatricality of the Kwakiutl’s riot of color and form to the more subdued cobalt blue masks of the Bella Coola and the ruder primitivism of the Salish, these were striking images—a combination of the cathedral and the fairground, classical sculpture and carnival, as Lévi-Strauss described them.
34
(the
voie
[way] echoing
voix
[voice]—another untranslatable title that was rendered
The Way of the Masks
in English), returned to one of Lévi-Strauss’s favorite haunts while in exile, the halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In among the totem poles were the rows of Northwest Coast Indian masks that Franz Boas had curated at the end of the nineteenth century. Carved in wood and painted in primary colors, the masks’ bulging eyes, protruding tongues, hooked noses and O-shaped mouths had long interested Lévi-Strauss aesthetically. From the theatricality of the Kwakiutl’s riot of color and form to the more subdued cobalt blue masks of the Bella Coola and the ruder primitivism of the Salish, these were striking images—a combination of the cathedral and the fairground, classical sculpture and carnival, as Lévi-Strauss described them.
34
The book emerged from two visits to British Columbia, a region that had featured strongly in all his work, particularly in the last volume of the
Mythologiques
. He spent the month of February 1973 in and around Vancouver at the invitation of the University of British Columbia, and returned on a looser visit with his family in the summer of 1974. Accompanied by friend and colleague Pierre Maranda, Lévi-Strauss visited bric-a-brac shops and ethnographic boutiques, along with indigenous-run museums of Northwest Coast art.
35
In one, he was surprised to see the traditional masks he held in such great esteem displayed alongside a mask of Mickey Mouse fashioned from “papier-mâché or molded plastic.”
36
He attended the famous potlatch ceremony—once a grand occasion of competitive gift-giving, which had formed the centerpiece of Marcel Mauss’s
Essai sur le don
, but now withered to the exchange of little presents.
Mythologiques
. He spent the month of February 1973 in and around Vancouver at the invitation of the University of British Columbia, and returned on a looser visit with his family in the summer of 1974. Accompanied by friend and colleague Pierre Maranda, Lévi-Strauss visited bric-a-brac shops and ethnographic boutiques, along with indigenous-run museums of Northwest Coast art.
35
In one, he was surprised to see the traditional masks he held in such great esteem displayed alongside a mask of Mickey Mouse fashioned from “papier-mâché or molded plastic.”
36
He attended the famous potlatch ceremony—once a grand occasion of competitive gift-giving, which had formed the centerpiece of Marcel Mauss’s
Essai sur le don
, but now withered to the exchange of little presents.
With the help of two psychiatrists at Vancouver General Hospital who had built up a rapport with British Columbia’s indigenous groups, Maranda managed to get Lévi-Strauss into a night dance on the Musqueam reservation, an event normally barred to whites. The ceremony involved young indigenous men with drug and alcohol problems who had been seized from downtown Vancouver and Seattle and submitted to fasting and bathing in the glacial runs of the Frazer River. In the “winter dances” they completed their detoxification treatment by being guided by shamans through a rebirthing process. The long night of drumming and chanting left a deep impression on Lévi-Strauss—nine months later he wrote to Maranda from Paris that he was “still bowled over” by what he had witnessed. In his return trip the following summer, this time accompanied by his wife, Monique, and their son, Matthieu, he went to Harrison Springs, where he met members of the Salish people. Completely unaware of Lévi-Strauss’s work, they talked unprompted about the importance of the “raw” and the “cooked” in their culture. During the first visit Lévi-Strauss had seen modern-day indigenous craftsmen re-creating the shapes and forms of their ancestors. In Victoria, Vancouver Island, he spoke to Nuu-chah-nulth carver Ron Hamilton in his workshop, in the midst of a series of half finished trunk-sized totem poles stretched out on a wood-chip covered floor. The scene, captured on camera for the Canadian documentary
Behind the Masks
, has a strong 1970s flavor to it. Hamilton, dressed in a thick woollen patterned sweater and jeans, sports a handlebar mustache and has long dark hair parted in the middle; Maranda wears a turtleneck sweater and suede trench coat and there is another figure in aviator glasses. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss’s nondescript overcoat and scarf are unplaceable—he looks like someone who has stumbled onto a meticulously arranged film set. He quizzed Hamilton about the symbolism of the figures and their relationship to local mythology, in particular the different ways of carving the eyes on Tsonokwa masks, whether deep set or half-closed to signify blindness.
Behind the Masks
, has a strong 1970s flavor to it. Hamilton, dressed in a thick woollen patterned sweater and jeans, sports a handlebar mustache and has long dark hair parted in the middle; Maranda wears a turtleneck sweater and suede trench coat and there is another figure in aviator glasses. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss’s nondescript overcoat and scarf are unplaceable—he looks like someone who has stumbled onto a meticulously arranged film set. He quizzed Hamilton about the symbolism of the figures and their relationship to local mythology, in particular the different ways of carving the eyes on Tsonokwa masks, whether deep set or half-closed to signify blindness.
He was trying to analyze the masks structurally, in sets, just as he had done to myths in the
Mythologiques
series. Instead of “mythemes,” Lévi-Strauss worked with aesthetic units—cavities versus protrusions; open versus half-closed eyes, bulging or sunken into their sockets; tongue visible versus tongue concealed; dark versus light hues; the use of feathers as against fur. In another virtuoso demonstration of his method, Lévi-Strauss found that the masks were in an inverted symmetrical relationship with the myths: when the message of neighboring myths was held constant, the plastic forms of the corresponding masks were inverted (sunken eyes becoming protruded, for example, or fur turning to feathers); and when the myths’ message flipped over, the masks’ formal properties were unchanged.
37
Mythologiques
series. Instead of “mythemes,” Lévi-Strauss worked with aesthetic units—cavities versus protrusions; open versus half-closed eyes, bulging or sunken into their sockets; tongue visible versus tongue concealed; dark versus light hues; the use of feathers as against fur. In another virtuoso demonstration of his method, Lévi-Strauss found that the masks were in an inverted symmetrical relationship with the myths: when the message of neighboring myths was held constant, the plastic forms of the corresponding masks were inverted (sunken eyes becoming protruded, for example, or fur turning to feathers); and when the myths’ message flipped over, the masks’ formal properties were unchanged.
37
“I myself feel the inadequacy of my work, because of its overly elliptical character,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, responding to comments on
La Voie des masques
that Pierre Maranda had sent. “Since I have finished writing it, I have discovered new things: already enough material for a further chapter.”
38
He did in fact get a chance to add this material in. Originally published in two slim, heavily illustrated volumes by the Swiss art imprint Éditions Albert Skira, it was later republished by Plon in a single volume with several additional chapters.
La Voie des masques
that Pierre Maranda had sent. “Since I have finished writing it, I have discovered new things: already enough material for a further chapter.”
38
He did in fact get a chance to add this material in. Originally published in two slim, heavily illustrated volumes by the Swiss art imprint Éditions Albert Skira, it was later republished by Plon in a single volume with several additional chapters.
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