Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (56 page)

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9
Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas
, p. 152.
 
10
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar,
p. 43.
 
11
Ibid., p. 50.
 
12
Ibid., p. 51.
 
13
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 345.
 
14
Luiz de Castro Faria interview, 1997.
 
15
Letter to Rivet, June 17, 1938, sent from Utiariti, in
Critique
, no. 620-21, January- February 1999, reproduced between pages 96 and 97. Forty thousand francs was the equivalent of around twenty thousand dollars in today’s money.
 
16
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 346.
 
17
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 59.
 
18
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 351.
 
19
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 63.
 
20
Lévi-Strauss, “Lettres à Mário de Andrade,” p. 260.
 
21
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 354; Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 68.
 
22
Lévi-Strauss cited in
Les Temps modernes
, no. 628, pp. 260-61.
 
23
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 73.
 
24
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 363.
 
25
Ibid., p. 374.
 
26
See Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil
, p. 126.
 
27
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, pp. 374, 427.
 
28
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 85.
 
29
That is, fire, water, earth, sun, moon, wind, night; small, big, near, far, much, pretty, ugly. Lévi-Strauss also included Portuguese vocabulary, a language he was still struggling with. On one page he writes, “
Nombre d’expressions employées pour dire: on = ‘o homen,’ ‘o camarada,’ ‘o collega
[
sic
]
’, ‘o negro,’ ‘o tal,’ ‘o fulano’
” (“Number of expressions used to say ‘one’ [in the sense of ‘you’]”); on another there is: “
Arroz-sem-sal (riz-sans-sel). On prononce ‘Rossemsal’
” (“Rice without salt, pronounced ‘Rossemsal’”). Claude Lévi-Strauss, “
Tristes Tropiques
: Docs préparatoires 4/10 souvenirs,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, pp. 100, 104.
 
30
Lévi-Strauss’s field notes are now kept in his archive in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Excerpts have been published in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres
, pp. 1617-26.
 
31
Cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss
, p. 116.
 
32
See “Cahiers du terrain,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, boxes 4-6.
 
33
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, pp. 88, 93.
 
34
Ibid., p. 85; Castro Faria, “Mission Tristes Tropiques,”
Libération
, September 1, 1988.
 
35
Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas
, p. 152.
 
36
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, pp. 102, 109-10.
 
37

Route très longue et sans intérêt . . . une longue et pénible traversée de forêt sèche
”: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Cahiers du terrain,” Campos Novos (2e quinzaine août 1938), Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
 
38
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, pp. 492-93.
 
39
Lévi-Strauss describes the play in
Tristes Tropiques
, pp. 495-500; the text has been published in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition
Oeuvres
, pp. 1632-50.
 
40
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 493.
 
41
Ibid., pp. 495-500.
 
42
Robert F. Murphy and Buell Quain,
The Trumaí Indians of Central Brazil
, J. J. Augustin, 1955, pp. 103-6.
 
43
Alfred Métraux,
Itinéraires 1 (1935-1953): carnets de notes et journaux de voyage
, Payot, 1978, p. 41.
 
44
Letter from Buell Quain to Heloísa Alberto Torres, August 2, 1939, in Mariza Corrêa and Januária Mello, eds.,
Querida Heloísa: cartas de campo para Heloísa Alberto Torres
, ed. (Unicampo, 2008), p. 84.
 
45
Ibid., p. 103.
 
46
The multiple interpretations have been spun together in Bernardo Carvalho’s mesmerizing fictionalized account
Nine Nights
(London: Vintage Books, 2008).
 
47
Murphy and Quain,
The Trumaí Indians
, p. 2.
 
48
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 393.
 
49
Ibid., pp. 389-90.
 
50
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 131; Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres
, p. 1727.
 
51
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 416.
 
52
Ibid., pp. 421-22.
 
53
Ibid., p. 449.
 
54
Ibid., p. 435.
 
55
Ibid., pp. 434, 221.
 
56
Ibid., p. 436.
 
57
Ibid., p. 451.
 
58

Impressionante. Ossos esmigalhados, nervos expostos, dedos partidos
”: Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 174.
 
59
Reproduced in
Le Magazine littéraire
, no. 223, 1985, p. 56.
 
60
Reproduced in Marcel Hénaff, “Chronologie,”
Le Magazine littéraire
, no. 311, 1993, p. 17; compare Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil
, p. 191.
 
61
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, pp. 456-57.
 
62
Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres
, p. 1767.
 
63
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, pp. 471-72.
 
64
Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar
, p. 185.
 
65
In the 1950s Lévi-Strauss spent one week studying two villages in the Chittagong hill tracts in what was then western Pakistan, and in the 1970s he made two short visits to British Columbia—but it would be stretching it to define these trips as ethnographic fieldwork.
 
66
Lévi-Strauss cited in
Les Temps modernes
, no. 628, p. 263.
 
67
See Lévi-Strauss, interview for
L’ Express
, in
Diacritics
, p. 47.
 
68
“Claude Lévi-Strauss in “Conversation with George Steiner,”
BBC Third Programme
, October 29, 1965.
 
69
Lévi-Strauss in “Le Coucher de soleil,” p. 6; Eribon,
Conversations
, p. 45.
 
70
Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations
, pp. 44-45.
 
71
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, pp. 492-93.
 
72
Castro Faria, “Mission Tristes Tropiques.”
 
73
Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
 
74
Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked
, p. 8.
 
75
Alban Bensa, interview with the author, January 2008.
 
76
Alfred Métraux,
Itinéraires 1
, p. 42.
 
77
In fact, counting all his expeditions, Lévi-Strauss left only 328 out of a total of 1,200 artifacts behind in Brazil—perhaps fortunately, for while his collections have been well preserved in Paris, the rest have languished uncataloged in the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da Universidade de São Paulo, where some pieces have simply disintegrated. See Elio Gaspari, “Parte da coleção de Lévi-Strauss virou pó,”
Folha de São Paulo
, November 11, 2009. When I visited USP in 2005, staff at the museum were unable even to locate Lévi-Strauss’s collection.
 
78
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Plon, p. 29, my translation; the translation in
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 34, has the racist-sounding “half-naked nigger boys” for the far milder “
une bande de négrillons à demi nus
” of the original.
 
4: EXILE
 
1
Denis de Rougemont,
Journal des Deux Mondes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 91. With the exception of the last phrase, “bitter yet cleansing wind,” the translation is taken from Jeffrey Mehlman,
Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944
(Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 62-63.
 
2

Il respira profondément . . . de façon très vague, Paul Thalamas pensa à Berkeley et à la célèbre théorie par laquelle l’évêque anglais prétend prouver, par la différence entre les dimensions apparentes de la lune au zénith et sur l’horizon, la relativité de nos impressions visuelles
”: Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres
, pp. 1628, 1630.
 
3
Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations
, p. 91.
 
4
Lévi-Strauss in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss
, p. 121.
 
5
Ibid., p. 121.
 
6
Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss
, p. 122.
 
7
Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
 
8

la bouffonnerie la plus totale
”: Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss
, p. 122.
 
9
Interview with Lévi-Strauss, Jérôme Garcin,
Boîte aux lettres
, France 3, 1984.
 
10
Jean Rouch in Lucien Taylor, “A Conversation with Jean Rouch,”
Visual Anthropology Review
, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 1991, p. 95.
 
11
Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations
, p. 25.
 
12
Gaston Roupnel in Fernand Braudel,
On History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 7.
 
13
Conditions could be harsh. In Gurs, camp officials worked out that “Uncle Raaf,” which was cropping up with increasing frequency in letters to relatives, was a code word for hunger, and had all references cut by the censor. Richard Vinen,
The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation
(London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 142.
 
14
Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations
, p. 26.
 
15
Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
 
16
Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations
, p. 99.
 
17
Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques
, Picador, p. 24.
 
18
Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres
, pp. 1734-35.
 
19
This is according to Lévi-Strauss himself, in an interview with the author, February 2007.
 
20
Victor Serge cited in Martica Sawin,
Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1995), p. 120.

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