Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (9 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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There were just three million people in the vast interior through which Lévi-Strauss would travel. Part-indigenous communities, the product of a now exhausted rubber boom, subsisted along the main waterways of the Amazon Basin. Clapboard mining towns had been left stranded in the scrublands of the central west. Farther south, colonization schemes were gradually opening up Paraná state, reducing great forests to pasturelands. Dwindling groups of indigenous Brazilians either had been drawn into settler society or were in flight from it. Herded into government reservations, they had become prey to missionaries, or exploited as cheap labor.
With an influx of European migrants and the beginnings of industrialization, Brazil’s biggest cities were forging their identities: Rio as a pleasure city, São Paulo as its industrious cousin—a Milan to Rio’s more sensual Rome. But the vestiges of traditional rural society were everywhere. On the outskirts of São Paulo there were campsites for mule trains arriving from the interior; saddle shops traded downtown. On Rio’s hillsides, the poor tended their gardens, chicken coops and pigpens. There was little modern infrastructure. Trucks were only just beginning to replace the mule trains, spending days shuddering in low gear along rutted, overgrown dirt tracks. On a journey from Rio de Janeiro to Belo Horizonte in Minas Gerais state in 1940, the famous Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer remembered having to yoke his sedan car to a team of oxen to drag it through the bog.
13
13
The Great Depression had ravaged Brazil’s commodity-based market, and by the time Lévi-Strauss arrived, the country was suffering the same political turbulence that was then spreading through Europe. Amid collapsing agricultural prices,
gaúcho
Getúlio Vargas had seized power by a coup in 1930. Flirting with fascism, he would survive the 1930s with difficulty, negotiating the demands of the Nazi-inspired Integralists and repressing the communists while placating the powerful farming block and the emerging urban elites. It was an environment in which left-wing intellectuals would become increasingly uncomfortable. Culturally, though, the French would be able to relax. In a hangover from the nineteenth-century empire years, France was still seen as the height of European refinement. Lévi-Strauss and his colleagues would not even have to worry about mastering Portuguese—they would lecture in French, a lingua franca among the educated urban elite.
14
gaúcho
Getúlio Vargas had seized power by a coup in 1930. Flirting with fascism, he would survive the 1930s with difficulty, negotiating the demands of the Nazi-inspired Integralists and repressing the communists while placating the powerful farming block and the emerging urban elites. It was an environment in which left-wing intellectuals would become increasingly uncomfortable. Culturally, though, the French would be able to relax. In a hangover from the nineteenth-century empire years, France was still seen as the height of European refinement. Lévi-Strauss and his colleagues would not even have to worry about mastering Portuguese—they would lecture in French, a lingua franca among the educated urban elite.
14
In contrast to Rio, Lévi-Strauss felt drawn to São Paulo. “It was an extraordinary city,” he remembered much later, “still middle-sized, but in complete upheaval, where you crossed over within a few feet of each other from the Iberian world of the eighteenth century to the Chicago of the 1880s.”
15
São Paulo was fast evolving into Brazil’s industrial hub. The population had just topped one million, the first skyscrapers were appearing on the skyline and rapid expansion was in the air. With waves of mainly Italian immigration priming the pumps, houses were going up by the hour, turning the surrounding farmland into a patchwork of construction sites and garden plots, cow pastures and concrete. “The air is brisk; the streets clang; electric signs challenge the stars with hyperbole,” wrote one traveler.
16
There were nouveau-riche extravaganzas, like a marina on an artificial lake and the luxury housing developments of the Jardim Europa that had begun springing up in what were then the suburbs. But there was old wealth too, dating back to the slave plantations of the nineteenth century. Weathered coffee-baron-built mansions lined the streets of the well-to-do suburbs, interspersed with gardens of eucalyptus and mango.
15
São Paulo was fast evolving into Brazil’s industrial hub. The population had just topped one million, the first skyscrapers were appearing on the skyline and rapid expansion was in the air. With waves of mainly Italian immigration priming the pumps, houses were going up by the hour, turning the surrounding farmland into a patchwork of construction sites and garden plots, cow pastures and concrete. “The air is brisk; the streets clang; electric signs challenge the stars with hyperbole,” wrote one traveler.
16
There were nouveau-riche extravaganzas, like a marina on an artificial lake and the luxury housing developments of the Jardim Europa that had begun springing up in what were then the suburbs. But there was old wealth too, dating back to the slave plantations of the nineteenth century. Weathered coffee-baron-built mansions lined the streets of the well-to-do suburbs, interspersed with gardens of eucalyptus and mango.
Lévi-Strauss captured the bustle of the immigrant town in a series of black-and-white images taken on a Leica that he had brought with him from Paris, occasionally adding a 75mm Hugo Meyer f1.5 lens, which he found “practically unusable because of its weight.”
17
In the photos, a selection of which was later published in
Saudades de São Paulo
, crowds surge down the avenues: men in crumpled white suits; women wearing heavy frocks, brooches and pearl necklaces, clasping small leather handbags. Herders on horseback maneuver cattle past a downtown commuter tram. There are smokestacks, run-down buildings and slums. The pink Art Deco Martinelli Building, then nearing completion, stands alone as a symbol of things to come, topped by rickety neon advertisements. Lévi-Strauss’s father, who joined him in Brazil during his first year, appears enigmatically in two of the photos—one at the jasmine-laced iron gates of his son’s house, looking down through the lens of his camera, and the other standing in front of a sign stenciled on a concrete wall saying “Plots of Land for Sale.” According to Lévi-Strauss, they would go out together taking pictures, competing to see who could produce the sharpest images.
18
17
In the photos, a selection of which was later published in
Saudades de São Paulo
, crowds surge down the avenues: men in crumpled white suits; women wearing heavy frocks, brooches and pearl necklaces, clasping small leather handbags. Herders on horseback maneuver cattle past a downtown commuter tram. There are smokestacks, run-down buildings and slums. The pink Art Deco Martinelli Building, then nearing completion, stands alone as a symbol of things to come, topped by rickety neon advertisements. Lévi-Strauss’s father, who joined him in Brazil during his first year, appears enigmatically in two of the photos—one at the jasmine-laced iron gates of his son’s house, looking down through the lens of his camera, and the other standing in front of a sign stenciled on a concrete wall saying “Plots of Land for Sale.” According to Lévi-Strauss, they would go out together taking pictures, competing to see who could produce the sharpest images.
18
GONE WERE THE POKY apartments of Paris and the provinces, the tight budgets, the freezing winters and the scrimping and saving of interwar rural France. Earning three times their salary in France, Lévi-Strauss and Dina lived in unaccustomed luxury. Soon after arriving, they moved into a substantial house with a walled garden just off Avenida Paulista. When they got there, Lévi-Strauss asked the owner to plant a banana tree “to give me the feeling of being in the tropics.” Much later, after his expeditions into the interior, the garden would house his parrot, along with a capuchin monkey.
19
He furnished the house with late-nineteenth-century rustic pieces, fashioned from soft jacaranda woods. They even found they could afford a servant and an almost-new Ford. The historian Fernand Braudel went as far as employing a chauffeur to drive his Chevrolet into the university, while block-booking two hotel rooms—one for himself, the other for his books and papers.
19
He furnished the house with late-nineteenth-century rustic pieces, fashioned from soft jacaranda woods. They even found they could afford a servant and an almost-new Ford. The historian Fernand Braudel went as far as employing a chauffeur to drive his Chevrolet into the university, while block-booking two hotel rooms—one for himself, the other for his books and papers.
The French mission saw themselves as cultural ambassadors, and initially formed an expatriate community at arm’s length from their Brazilian counterparts. In the evenings they would go to French realist films staring Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet.
20
On the weekends they explored the outskirts of São Paulo, from the coffee plantations in the north to the makeshift tracks through the ravines in the south. At the university there was an air of competition, and even of snobbishness. “All of us thought our careers were riding on our success or failure in Brazil, so we all attempted to surround ourselves with an exclusive court, more important than our neighbors,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “It was very French, very academic, but there in the tropics, it was a little ridiculous and not very healthy.”
21
20
On the weekends they explored the outskirts of São Paulo, from the coffee plantations in the north to the makeshift tracks through the ravines in the south. At the university there was an air of competition, and even of snobbishness. “All of us thought our careers were riding on our success or failure in Brazil, so we all attempted to surround ourselves with an exclusive court, more important than our neighbors,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “It was very French, very academic, but there in the tropics, it was a little ridiculous and not very healthy.”
21
From the outset, Lévi-Strauss trod a difficult intellectual path. Employed as a sociology lecturer, he was expected to teach the prevailing Durkheimian orthodoxy, an approach that he had rejected as politically conservative and too prescriptive. He had perhaps been influenced by the 1932 polemic
Les Chiens de garde
(
Watchdogs
), in which Paul Nizan had argued that, as a result of Durkheim’s institutional success, “teachers taught children to respect the French nation, to justify class collaboration, to accept everything, to join in the cult of the Flag and the bourgeois Democracy.”
22
In any case, through reading Lowie and Boas, Lévi-Strauss was already moving toward cultural anthropology and more Anglo-American, fieldwork-oriented methods of research. Sociologist Paul Arbousse Bastide, a nephew of Dumas, tried to force Lévi-Strauss to adhere to a traditional French approach, teaching not only Durkheim, but also nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Comte’s positivist sociology. When Lévi-Strauss bridled, Bastide attempted to fire him. But with the support of colleagues—the geographer Pierre Monbeig and especially Fernand Braudel—Lévi-Strauss survived with his independence intact.
23
Les Chiens de garde
(
Watchdogs
), in which Paul Nizan had argued that, as a result of Durkheim’s institutional success, “teachers taught children to respect the French nation, to justify class collaboration, to accept everything, to join in the cult of the Flag and the bourgeois Democracy.”
22
In any case, through reading Lowie and Boas, Lévi-Strauss was already moving toward cultural anthropology and more Anglo-American, fieldwork-oriented methods of research. Sociologist Paul Arbousse Bastide, a nephew of Dumas, tried to force Lévi-Strauss to adhere to a traditional French approach, teaching not only Durkheim, but also nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Comte’s positivist sociology. When Lévi-Strauss bridled, Bastide attempted to fire him. But with the support of colleagues—the geographer Pierre Monbeig and especially Fernand Braudel—Lévi-Strauss survived with his independence intact.
23
His early courses pointed toward the areas that he would go on to develop throughout his career. They included kinship (under the rubric of “domestic sociology”), totemism (“religious sociology”) and cross-cultural research (“comparative sociology”), using a limited bibliography of Durkheim, Lowie, Van Gennep and Westermark. In a later conference he looked at the area with which he would eventually become synonymous: myth. The conference—The Tales of Charles Perrault—compared fairy tales with indigenous mythology and looked at how myths fit into the worldview of indigenous peoples. One area that he would subsequently abandon was physical anthropology—a discipline not yet tarnished by the racist strains developed in Nazi Germany. Like many foreigners, he became fascinated by the variations in skin color and physiognomy in Brazil, the result of centuries of miscegenation. He envisaged Brazil as the perfect laboratory for the study of genetic inheritance and championed the idea of setting up a research department to produce an atlas of physical and cultural anthropology.
24
24
Using materials at hand, Lévi-Strauss developed practical exercises. For the kinship course, the exam consisted of a series of family trees from which the students had to deduce the social rules of the group and work out who would be able to marry whom.
25
Another exercise involved a sociological analysis of the city of São Paulo circa 1820, working from the era’s archives. “I put my students to work on their own city,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “We did monographs on districts, sometimes on single streets.”
26
25
Another exercise involved a sociological analysis of the city of São Paulo circa 1820, working from the era’s archives. “I put my students to work on their own city,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “We did monographs on districts, sometimes on single streets.”
26
Beyond teaching, for thinkers like Braudel and Lévi-Strauss, the Brazil years furnished space for contemplation, reading and research. It was “a paradise for work and reflection,” Braudel remembered. In one of the first experiments in microfilm, he had paid a photographer to take pictures of thousands of documents, which he worked his way through in São Paulo. “I spent three marvellous years in this fashion: in winter, during the vacations, I was in the Mediterranean; the rest of the year, in Brazil, with leisure and fantastic possibilities for reading.”
27
27
In time, Lévi-Strauss and Dina broke out of their stifling expat environment. Forging links with a circle of Brazilian intellectuals and writers,
28
they began engaging with Brazil at a seminal moment in its modern evolution. In the 1930s, the country was rediscovering its roots. Artists, influenced by the symbolist/surrealist strain of the French avant-garde, were turning their attention to Brazilian subject matter: the rustic shantytown, samba groups, Afro-Brazilian coffee plantation workers, pineapples and toucans. Tarsila do Amaral’s Léger-like tumescent women, cacti and palms crowned a homegrown modernist movement with the iconic image
Anthropophagy
, a tropical riposte to the avant-garde scene in Paris, where she had lived and worked. It was named after Oswald de Andrade’s 1928
Manifesto antropófago
(
Cannibalist Manifesto
), which rejected Western rationalism in favor of “liberating primitivism” and saw Brazilian culture’s creativity as a process of devouring other cultures, absorbing their essences and reconfiguring them into something new and original—a kind of postmodernism
avant la lettre
. What had previously been denigrated as backward and provincial was now forming the basis of a cultural revival. Gilberto Freyre’s revisionist classic—
Casa-Grande e Senzala
(
The Masters and the Slaves
) (1933)—which celebrated Brazil’s racial mix, had just been published; Jorge Amado had begun producing his picaresque novels—such as
O País do Carnaval
(1931),
Suor
(1934) and
Jubiabá
(1935)—exploring the underside of life in Bahia; and the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was turning to regional folk music for inspiration.
28
they began engaging with Brazil at a seminal moment in its modern evolution. In the 1930s, the country was rediscovering its roots. Artists, influenced by the symbolist/surrealist strain of the French avant-garde, were turning their attention to Brazilian subject matter: the rustic shantytown, samba groups, Afro-Brazilian coffee plantation workers, pineapples and toucans. Tarsila do Amaral’s Léger-like tumescent women, cacti and palms crowned a homegrown modernist movement with the iconic image
Anthropophagy
, a tropical riposte to the avant-garde scene in Paris, where she had lived and worked. It was named after Oswald de Andrade’s 1928
Manifesto antropófago
(
Cannibalist Manifesto
), which rejected Western rationalism in favor of “liberating primitivism” and saw Brazilian culture’s creativity as a process of devouring other cultures, absorbing their essences and reconfiguring them into something new and original—a kind of postmodernism
avant la lettre
. What had previously been denigrated as backward and provincial was now forming the basis of a cultural revival. Gilberto Freyre’s revisionist classic—
Casa-Grande e Senzala
(
The Masters and the Slaves
) (1933)—which celebrated Brazil’s racial mix, had just been published; Jorge Amado had begun producing his picaresque novels—such as
O País do Carnaval
(1931),
Suor
(1934) and
Jubiabá
(1935)—exploring the underside of life in Bahia; and the classical composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was turning to regional folk music for inspiration.
The Lévi-Strausses became close friends with poet and musician Mário de Andrade, the lynchpin of the group. Among his many cultural interests, Andrade had dabbled in what was then called folklore, sponsoring ethnomusicological expeditions to the northeast. In a similar way to John Lomax’s salvaging of American folk music, he had built up a mammoth archive of recordings from the remotest Brazilian towns, from neo-slave-work chants to Afro-Brazilian dance and song and peasant folk music.
Dina Lévi-Strauss became an active member of the folklore society, which Andrade ran from his offices at the São Paulo municipal government’s Department of Culture, attending meetings and contributing articles. She gave a course on the “science of ethnography,” including physical anthropology, linguistics and archaeology. The focus was on the detailed study of the ethnographic artifact, based on the Maussian notion that “almost all phenomena of life can be decoded through material objects.” To this end she taught how to make systematic documentary records, using tables of preset questionnaires, drawings, photography and film. The course, which attracted a devoted following, was held in a dingy attic in the Department of Culture from eight in the evening until midnight.
29
29
According to Mário Wagner Vieira da Cunha, future economics professor at the University of São Paulo, who took both Lévi-Strauss’s and Dina’s courses, tensions developed around the warm relationship that Dina had formed with Mário de Andrade:
He [Andrade] had a soft spot for her, like we all had, because she was a beautiful girl, around our age. Lévi-Strauss was jealous of this situation—with reason . . . I used to go to their house on Cincinato Braga, because we had a lot of meetings about the Ethnographic and Folklore Society. With Dina, we would start talking and never stop. Lévi-Strauss used to check up on us. He wouldn’t come into the room where we were. But he used to walk around in the adjoining rooms, stomping about as if to say I am here and I want the conversation to stop soon.
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