FURTHER READING

Approaching the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss can be daunting. He was a prolific writer, active for over half a century, publishing several hundred essays and more than a dozen books—seven on mythology alone—throughout his long career. In the 1980s a book-length bibliography of secondary sources was published; since then, another library of Lévi-Strauss-related material has appeared with a late surge of publications to commemorate his centenary. Sheer quantity is at times matched by a density of ideas and material—indeed, some stretches of The Elementary Structures of Kinship and the Mythologiques quartet are not for the fainthearted.

But for someone often considered an intellectual elitist, Lévi-Strauss had a popular touch, especially in the many interviews, radio broadcasts and documentary films in which he participated over the years. He was extremely articulate, effortlessly delivering potted summaries of his most demanding books. There was also an autobiographical strain to his work, which often interweaved incidents from his life with own thinking, the two sometimes merging into a kind of vital essence. And for readers unfamiliar with French, all of Lévi-Strauss’s books and most of his essays have been translated into English.

Of the many interviews he gave, Didier Eribon’s book-length Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss is by far the most comprehensive and searching.¹ Divided into three parts, it covers his early travels; the rise of structuralism; and his ideas on art, politics and culture. Lévi-Strauss’s late 1950s radio interviews with Georges Charbonnier have also been published in book form.² In this encounter, Lévi-Strauss talked at length about contemporary art and music. On the subject of myth, the Massey lectures, later published as Myth and Meaning, are as clear as the originals are opaque.³ A good compilation of his television interviews, as well as a highly watchable feature documentary, is Pierre-André Boutang and Annie Chevallay’s Lévi-Strauss: In His Own Words; while the Canadian Film Board’s documentary, Behind the Masks, which covers his first trip to British Columbia in the 1970s, gives a flavor of his method, featuring a short lecture summarizing his analysis of myths and masks.⁴

One of the best summaries of his ideas in English is Edmund Leach’s Claude Lévi-Strauss, which, in a series of essays, takes the reader step-by-step through the complexities of Lévi-Strauss’s arguments.⁵ Also interesting is David Pace’s Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes, a critical assessment of the development of his ideas.⁶ François Dosse’s two-volume narrative account of the era, History of Structuralism, contextualizes Lévi-Strauss’s work and the enormous influence he had over his contemporaries.⁷ For a witty, bare-bones summary, replete with cartoon figures of Lévi-Strauss expounding his theories in speech bubbles, Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves’s Introducing Lévi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology, offers a rapid, but by no means trivialized, introduction to Lévi-Strauss.⁸

French anthropologist Dan Sperber’s “Claude Lévi-Strauss Today,” which combines admiration and skepticism in the right measure, is one of the most balanced and intelligent essay-length assessments of his work.⁹ Coming from a more literary perspective, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss” is a critique of what he calls Lévi-Strauss’s “infernal culture machine,” ending up questioning whether Lévi-Strauss’s theories represent “science or alchemy.”¹⁰ Good chapter-length summaries of Lévi-Strauss’s work can also be found in Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution; John Sturrock, Structuralism; J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought; and Boris Wiseman’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought.¹¹ Published in 1970, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero brings together an interesting selection of short review pieces by Susan Sontag, David Maybury-Lewis and Sanche de Gramont among others, written at the height of Lévi-Strauss’s fame.¹²

For those wishing to return to the original works, Lévi-Strauss’s classic memoir, Tristes Tropiques, remains by far the most accessible and enjoyable entry point into his oeuvre.¹³ The narrative follows his early years as a disillusioned university student, through to his discovery of anthropology and fieldwork in Brazil. Strangely, it skips over his crucial period of exile in New York, though this gap was partially filled by a short, descriptive essay on his first impressions on arriving in Manhattan in the third volume of his essay anthologies, The View from Afar. ¹⁴ For a visual companion piece to Tristes Tropiques, the coffee-table book, Saudades do Brasil showcases Lévi-Strauss’s formidable talents as a field photographer.¹⁵

In his academic works, certain key chapters stand out as accessible encapsulations of his ideas. Lévi-Strauss often began and ended his books with clarity; it is the following through of the argument, demonstrated by hundreds of examples, that can be a slog for the general reader. The “Overture” and the “Finale” of the Mythologiques series, for instance, summarize the project in lucid prose; the intervening two thousand pages, though, require high levels of concentration to hold on to all the strands of Lévi-Strauss’s argument while remembering the twists and turns of an ever-accumulating stock of mythic material.¹⁶ Similarly, The Savage Mind begins with a statement of key notions—the importance of disinterested classification, bricolage and the science of the concrete—but then drifts into complex ethnographic applications of these ideas.¹⁷ The same could be said of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, which opens with a general discussion of the fundamental distinction between nature and culture and the power of the incest taboo, before becoming overladen with kinship diagrams and ethnographic minutiae.¹⁸

Lévi-Strauss is certainly easier to manage at essay length. “The Structural Study of Myth,” his classic early demonstration of his method using Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, is a key reference point.¹⁹ For an easy overview of some of his more general ideas, Lévi-Strauss wrote short, popularizing essays for the UNESCO Courier, covering discussions on the illusory notion of the “primitive,” the relationship between shamans and psychoanalysis and structural analyses of cooking, that are now available online.²⁰

For readers of French, the options are virtually limitless. However, a few of the more recently published titles stand out. Denis Bertholet’s 2003 biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss, is a detailed overview of his life and ideas.²¹ Frédéric Keck has written a series of clear introductions to Lévi-Strauss’s work, including Lévi-Strauss et la pensée sauvage; Claude Lévi-Strauss, une introduction; and, with Vincent Debaene, Claude Lévi-Strauss: L’homme au regard éloigné.²² The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Oeuvres, published when Lévi-Strauss was ninety-nine, is a fitting conclusion to his life and work.²³ It contains not just the bulk of his oeuvre, but previously unpublished material from Lévi-Strauss’s recently opened archive at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, including excerpts from his aborted novel, the first acts of a play he wrote in Brazil and his field notes. All this is presented with the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’s customary gravitas, from the almost weightless Bible paper and soft leather cover to the pale pink flyleaves and the gold-embossed “Claude Lévi-Strauss Oeuvres” on the spine.