Claude Levi-Strauss

IN EARLY FEBRUARY 1935, accompanied by his wife, Dina, Lévi-Strauss boarded the Mendoza at the port of Marseille, pulling out into the Mediterranean for the first leg of the journey. In his memoir, Tristes Tropiques, he recalled the moment as a haze of sensations, which was in reality a blend of memories of the many departures for the Americas that he would subsequently make. As the ship eased into the Mediterranean, the oily odors of the port vanished on the sea air. Drifting in and out of sleep, he breathed in a mix of salt, fresh paint and cooking smells rising from the galley while listening to “the throbbing of the engines and the rustling of the water against the hull.”² He was twenty-six years old, leaving Europe for the first time, setting out for Brazil.

He traveled first-class as one of a handful of passengers on the eight-thousand-ton two-funneled steamer, which was freighting cargo across the Atlantic. Free to stroll the empty decks, he and his colleagues enjoyed long lunches in ballroom-sized refectories and smoking rooms, and spent hours reading in their substantial cabins. Mustachioed stewards dished out huge portions of suprême de poularde and filets de turbot; sailors dressed in blue overalls cleaned the empty corridors and dabbed paint onto ventilator shafts as the Mendoza slipped through the Mediterranean. From the passengers’ perspective, it was a luxury ghost ship, whose limitless space and amenities Lévi-Strauss would fully appreciate only after he had suffered the squalor and overcrowding of the refugee boat that rescued him from Nazi Europe.

After calling at Algiers and ports along the Spanish and Moroccan coasts, loading cargo by day, sailing through the night, the Mendoza dropped down to Dakar. Once on the high seas, the schools of dolphins and seabirds vanished, leaving only the “adjoining surfaces” of ocean and overcast sky.³ Lévi-Strauss spent much of the three-week crossing in a state of intense intellectual excitement, “strolling on the bridge, almost always alone, his eyes wide open, but his being shut off to the world, as if he was scared of forgetting what he had just seen.”⁴ In a strange inversion, he would later describe the ship as the fixed point around which the changing scenery was maneuvered—like rotating theater sets on a stage.

On one occasion he jotted down notes as he watched the sun sink behind the ocean in a welter of color. His long, lyrical description of the sunset survives, reprinted in Tristes Tropiques, a passage that is an intriguing intimation of what could have been. Like many early attempts at creative writing, it is a heaping of literary effects, a runaway production of images, metaphors and ideas. In the space of seven pages he likens clouds to pyramids, flagstones, dolmens, celestial reefs, vaporous grottoes and even, at one point, an octopus. There are invisible layers of crystal, ethereal ramparts, blurred blues, and “pink and yellow colours: shrimp, salmon, flax, straw.” An extended theater metaphor involves floodlights, stage sets and a postperformance “overture” (as they apparently used to be performed in old operas).⁵ Amid this overwrought experiment were stylistic elements that would later reappear. Even in his densest academic articles, Lévi-Strauss had an eye for descriptive detail and a fondness for metaphor, as well as a fascination for natural forms and processes.

Long before the Brazilian littoral was visible, he had picked up the scent of forest, fruit and tobacco, drifting off the landmass out into the ocean. In the early hours of the following day, a dim outline of the coast came into view—the jagged cordillera of the Serra do Mar escarpments. The Mendoza followed the ranges down the coast, gliding past stretches of beach, tropical forest and blackened rock. Dodging a scattering of globe-shaped islands, the ship approached the famous heads of Rio’s Guanabara Bay, with its backdrop of polished mounds, fingerlike peaks and granite slabs.

Years later Lévi-Strauss wrote of the thoughts that ran through his mind as he viewed this spectacle, so alien from the European panoramas that he was familiar with. Here was landscape of a different order, on a grander scale than anything he had experienced before. Its appreciation, he wrote, required a mental adjustment, a rejigging of perspective and ratio, as the observer shrank before nature’s immensity. But when the ship pulled into Rio’s harbor, Lévi-Strauss was famously disappointed. Despite his mental efforts, the scenario offended his sense of classical proportions. The Sugarloaf and Corcovado mountains were too big in relation to their surroundings, like “stumps . . . in a toothless mouth,” as if nature had left behind an unfinished, lopsided terrain. The towering rocks and supersized bay had left little room for the city itself, which was forced into the narrow corridors, “like fingers bent in a tight, ill-fitting glove.”⁶ Rio’s palm-lined boulevards and turn-of-the-century architecture were like nineteenth-century Nice or Biarritz. “The tropics,” he later wrote, “were less exotic than out of date.”⁷ (His dismissal of the beauties of Rio de Janeiro still smarts in Brazil, even featuring in a famous Caetano Veloso song: “Claude Lévi-Strauss detestou a baía de Guanabara”—meaning “Lévi-Strauss hated Guanabara Bay”). But Lévi-Strauss told me that this was merely a first impression, and that in subsequent visits he came to love the city.⁸

He spent a few days in Rio, exploring the city on foot. The walkways were inlaid with small off-white and slate-colored stones from Portugal hammered into the pavement, arranged into a repeating pattern of swirls and organic shapes, like a mosaic from antiquity. Wending his way through the backstreets, he was impressed by the apparent lack of distinction between inside and outside, with shops spilling onto the pavement and cafés piling up green coconuts on the street. “My first impression of Rio was of an open-air reconstruction of the Gallerias of Milan, the Galerij in Amsterdam, the Passage des Panoramas, or the concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare,” he wrote.⁹

Armed with a copy of Jean de Léry’s L’Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, Lévi-Strauss tried with difficulty to imagine the Tupinambá villages that had once dotted the bay. From the busy downtown commercial district, a smattering of favelas were visible on the hillsides—more like rustic wattle and mud villages than the breezeblock slums of today. The more affluent suburbs of Flamengo and Botafogo clustered around the bay, while on the ocean-facing side, through a connecting tunnel, lay Copacabana, then a bucolic town beginning its rapid ascent as a super-Cannes.

On his last evening in Rio, Lévi-Strauss took the funicular halfway up Corcovado Mountain, where he dined with some American colleagues on a platform with sumptuous views over the bay. Later that night he embarked on the Mendoza for the final leg to Santos. Rain sluiced down as the ship tracked down a barely settled coastline, passing run-down colonial ports built during the eighteenth-century gold rush. The flagstone roads that had once connected them to gold fields in the interior were now lost, hidden under the leaf litter of the rainforest. All that remained of the mule trains that had plied the route were rusty horseshoes strewn about the forest floor. The wealth that had built the towns was long gone, siphoned off across the Atlantic into the follies—the monasteries, palaces and villas—of the Portuguese court.

The Mendoza reached the port of Santos, docking beside cargo boats piled high with sacks of coffee beans. In pouring rain, the French entourage disembarked onto the quays where Júlio Mesquita, the owner of the newspaper Estado de São Paulo and one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the university, was waiting to receive them. Mesquita drove them on to São Paulo, a hundred-kilometer trip along the now disused Caminho do Mar. After crossing a humid plain of lush banana plantations, the road rose steeply through wisps of vapor into the cooler airs of the Serra do Mar tropical forests. Lévi-Strauss was captivated, marveling through the car window at the galleries of novel vegetation “arranged like tiers of specimens in a museum.”¹⁰ From the summit there were spectacular views back toward the sea; “water and land mingled like in the world’s creation,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, “veiled in a pink mist that barely cloaked the banana plantations.”¹¹ From here the road rolled down the gently sloping plateau on the other side, past exhausted coffee plantations and the odd hut of a Japanese settler, down into the outskirts of São Paulo.

Mesquita delivered them to the suitably named Hotel Terminus, where the group would stay while they settled in. They had arrived with the carnival in full swing, and on their first night they ventured out into the soupy air to explore the surrounding streets. In a nearby neighborhood, music boomed out of the open window of a house. They approached and were told by a tall Afro-Brazilian man at the door that they could come if they wanted to dance, but not just to watch. Lévi-Strauss remembered dancing awkwardly, stumbling over Afro-Brazilian women who accepted his invitations “with complete indifference.”¹²

WHEN LÉVI-STRAUSS ARRIVED in São Paulo, Brazil was modernizing, emerging from the shadows of its colonial past. But the process had been sporadic and uneven. Robbed of the lure of the Pacific, westward migration had ended inconclusively, petering out in the marshlands and forests of the South American hinterland. The bulk of the population still lived within striking distance of the sea—in cities and towns along the coast and around the coffee plantations, cane fields and cattle ranches that rolled back into the countryside.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

THE CITY OF SÃO PAULO was one reality for the Lévi-Strausses in Brazil, with their teaching duties, soirées with the Paulista elite and the more informal meetings with Brazilian intellectuals. The other reality was on the routes out of São Paulo, which Lévi-Strauss and Dina explored on weekends and in breaks from teaching. In the suburbs, where they found a miscellany of Syrian and Italian immigrant communities, along with Afro-Brazilians, they took footage of the Moçambique, Cavalhada and Congada dances, six minutes of which still exist in municipal archives in São Paulo.³¹ Beyond the city, they reached the outlying German-, Italian- and Polish-dominated towns, along with the closed-off agricultural colonies of the Japanese.

The first long journeys were into the pioneer zones, which the British colonization company Paraná Plantations Limited was opening up by driving a railroad into the interior. Every fifteen kilometers or so, workmen cleared lots and small towns developed, with dirt roads and roughly constructed wooden houses, built by the Eastern European immigrants who were filtering into the area. The populations dwindled as the plots moved farther down the line, from a thriving town of fifteen thousand in the first settlement to five thousand in the second, followed by a thousand, ninety and forty, down to a solitary Frenchman living in the outermost clearing.³²

The pioneer zone fascinated Lévi-Strauss. These dusty settlements taking shape in the ruddy soils of the interior were like proto-cities; “at the meeting point of nature and artifice,” new entities were coming into being. As roads divided districts, and districts differentiated into the commercial and residential, the settlements self-organized along central and peripheral, parallel and perpendicular axes. Dreamed up by politicians and businessmen, the pioneer towns were as far as you could get from spontaneous, ad hoc development. But even so, Lévi-Strauss sensed a pattern, cut from a panhuman cloth—an involuntary reflex of the human condition. “Space has its own values,” he wrote, “just as sounds and perfumes have colours and feelings weight.”³³ And these values molded human behavior in profound ways. As innocuous as they might have looked to the casual observer, the pioneer towns hinted at a deeper truth that Lévi-Strauss would soon recognize in a more traditional ethnographic setting as he pondered the highly structured way in which tribes positioned their huts.

Farther to the west, the state of Paraná was still a wilderness, out of reach of the colonization projects. It was in this vast forest—today cane fields and cattle ranches—that Lévi-Strauss, accompanied by an agent from the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI (Indian Protection Service), had his first contacts with native Brazilians. He had arrived in Brazil drunk with romantic expectation: “I was in a state of intense intellectual excitement,” Lévi-Strauss described much later. “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first sixteenth-century explorers. I was discovering the New World for myself. Everything seemed mythical: the scenery, the plants, the animals.”³⁴ Eager to win his spurs as an anthropologist, he now stood on the brink of the exotic encounters that he had read about in Paris. But what he found when he entered a small Tibagy encampment in the forests of Paraná was sobering.

Scattered on the earthen floor of the huts were the flotsam of industrialization—enamel plates, poor-quality utensils and “the skeletal remains of a sewing machine.” There were old-fashioned pistols alongside bows and arrows; matches were known, but rubbing sticks together was still the preferred method of making fire. In among the junk, Lévi-Strauss’s collector’s eye spotted a beautifully crafted stone mortar and pestle, possibly traded from another indigenous group. He left with the impression that they were “neither completely true Indians, nor, what was more important, ‘savages.’” It was an experience that “took away the poetry from my naïve vision,” Lévi-Strauss remembered.³⁵

Continuing his tour, Lévi-Strauss spent days on horseback, stumbling up and down the narrow forest trails that wended their way under a thirty-meter forest canopy. From time to time their party would pass small groups of Indians, walking in single file through the forest in silence. At journey’s end was the 450-strong São Jerônimo reservation—a series of broken-down sheds strewn across an open clearing, housing members of the Kaingang tribe. The Kaingang had experienced the full panoply of the native Brazilian experience: they had suffered flu pandemics and German colonists had hunted them down before the SPI subjected them to well-meaning but heavy-handed attempts at “pacification” and acculturation, only to abandon them to their run-down reservations.

The men wore tattered trousers, the women cotton dresses or “just a blanket tucked under their armpits.”³⁶ They fished with half-learned versions of techniques picked up from the colonists, attaching hooks to the end of sticks and using scraps of cloth as nets, as well as harvesting bananas, sweet potatoes and maize from gardens in forest clearings. In the huts there was the same miscellany of cheap industrial products—pots, pans, cooking utensils and, in a surreal touch, an umbrella. Lévi-Strauss had been looking for exquisitely crafted material culture; what he had found was junk—an ironic allusion to nineteenth-century poet the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont’s famous definition of beauty which inspired the surrealist movement: “the chance encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Lévi-Strauss tried to barter for the few traditional objects that remained—gourds fashioned from hollowed-out marrows—but “felt ashamed to deprive people who have so little.”³⁷

One traditional delicacy was still enjoyed—a type of pale grub known as koro, which thrived in the rotting hollows of tree trunks on the forest bed. After decades of prejudice and persecution, the Kaingang had become ashamed of their own culture, whisking away the delicacy when outsiders visited. Lévi-Strauss was determined to track some down and, coming across a fever-stricken Indian in a deserted village, resorted to questionable tactics: “We put an axe into his hands, shook him and pushed him.” The Indian did not respond, so “we succeeded in dragging our victim to a tree trunk,” where a single axe-blow revealed a heaving mass of koro inside the sodden wood. Hesitating at first, Lévi-Strauss popped one in his mouth and savored a taste that he described as a combination between “the delicacy of butter, and the flavour of coconut milk.”³⁸

He had had his first, bittersweet experiences of fieldwork—not the heroics of Léry’s Tupinambá, but the tragicomedy of cultures on the fringes of the ever-expanding frontier. He had arrived too late. All that was left was the cultural gray water, a depressing mix of tradition and modernity, each corrupted by the other. The experience marked him, confirming his jaundiced view of the West, which he would come to see as a corrosive force that was dissolving mankind’s cultural achievements. He realized that he would have to travel farther afield if he wanted to catch a glimpse of something less degraded, more authentic. He realized, too, that this would always be the anthropologist’s fate. Like the indigenous peoples they were trying to study, they were compelled to embark on the ultimately futile exercise of outrunning the spread of their own culture.

IN NOVEMBER 1935, at the end of the university year when most of the French academics returned to spend the holidays in Europe, Lévi-Strauss and his wife stayed on to embark on their first real attempts at fieldwork in Brazil. Just a generation before, maps of São Paulo state were still being sold with blank spaces marked “unknown territories inhabited by Indians.”³⁹ By the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss would have to cross the state lines into Mato Grosso—then a vast wilderness, loosely connected by train, river, dirt road and mule trail—to get firsthand experience of relatively isolated indigenous peoples. The trip was largely self-financed, with some help from Mário de Andrade at the São Paulo Department of Culture. Lévi-Strauss was instructed by the Museu Nacional in Rio to survey an archaeological site in the region, but his prime objective was to work among the Caduveo⁴⁰ on the Paraguayan border and to visit “by an as-yet-undetermined route”⁴¹ the Bororo in central Mato Grosso, gathering data and material culture for the newly created Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

Accompanied by high school friend René Silz, who had come out from France for the expedition, the couple flew the first 350 kilometers to Bauru, a small town to the west of São Paulo. The light aircraft passed over rows of squat coffee bushes, furrowing the hillsides like vineyards. Pasturelands stretched out over the red soils of the interior, the vivid russet palette “so typical,” noted Dina, that they “immediately take on a significance for the foreigner who arrives in Brazil.”⁴² From Bauru, they stowed their luggage—“a trunk, two bags, three navy bags, three tents, a medicine bag and a tent cloth”⁴³—on a rickety wood-burning locomotive for the journey across the western portion of São Paulo state. A fine reddish dust blew off the desiccated landscape, coating the carriages, as the train rattled on toward Porto Esperança. After changing train companies on the Mato Grosso state lines,⁴⁴ the tracks straightened, and the landscape flattened out, leaving endless forests and fields against huge skies. The greens had deadened, the vegetation settled into dry bush, with scatterings of hardy trees and palms. The well-fed cattle that had sauntered across the Paulista pastures were now scrawnier, bony beasts picking through anthill-covered scrub. It was bleak, yet beautiful, “wild and melancholic, but how grandiose, how moving,” as Dina wrote of these epic landscapes.⁴⁵

After a few days carrying out an archaeological survey for the Museu Nacional, Dina was taken ill and returned to São Paulo. Lévi-Strauss and Silz continued on to Miranda, a few stops from Porto Esperança on the Paraguay River, where Lévi-Strauss had brief contact with a group of Terena Indians. From the terminus at Porto Esperança they took a secondary line—a precariously laid track skirting the Pantanal swamplands. The marshes sent the smell of rotting vegetation drifting up through the floorboards, along with swarms of mosquitoes. But this complex of rivers, muddy pools, embankments and shrub, covering an area the size of England, was also one of the world’s great wildlife sanctuaries. To Lévi-Strauss’s delight, veados (a type of deer), native emus and flocks of egrets scattered before the train.

As they pushed into the more remote regions, their demeanor and garb became more conspicuous. For their fellow passengers, most of whom worked on the railway, the idea that two foreign men were going to such lengths to track down indigenous peoples seemed outlandish. In their minds, the expedition was clearly a front for some kind of commercial survey—gringos prospecting for gold, precious stones or minerals.

They left the train at “kilometer twelve” and made their way to a ranch run by two Frenchmen—known locally as the Fazenda Francesa—their base for an expedition to Caduveo indigenous settlements. They spent six weeks on the ranch, time enough for Dina to rejoin the expedition.⁴⁶ They were now back in cattle country, on the Paraguayan borderlands. The Fazenda Francesa operated as a kind of colonial outpost, running an exorbitantly priced trade store and managing the vaqueiros (ranchers), many of them indigenous people, who tended the wandering herds of zebu cattle. Lévi-Strauss’s party gathered supplies—rice, beans, farinha, mate and coffee, the staples of the Brazilian interior—along with “a heavy load of goods for barter.” Among the diverse items were dolls and toy animals for the children, glass bead necklaces, little mirrors, bracelets, rings and perfumes for the women, and “more serious gifts” such as fabric, blankets and male clothing.⁴⁷ They set off with indigenous farmhand guides for the last leg of the trip, a three-day haul on horseback to Nakile, the largest Caduveo settlement.

Through grasslands and the muddy outskirts of the Pantanal, they scaled the Serra da Bodoquena, reaching a plateau of brush and cacti. From there they followed “the Indian road,” down a track so steep they had to lead the horses on foot, to a clearing at the bottom of the slopes known as the campo dos índios (Indians’ fields), where they made camp and ate. They were now in the Pantanal proper, an area so flat that much of the water accumulated on the plains, rather than draining off into the surrounding river systems.

A few of kilometers from the main village, the expedition party stopped off at a small Caduveo settlement on the Pitoko River—“a silent stream that arose mysteriously somewhere in the Pantanal, and disappeared just as mysteriously.” There, they slung hammocks in a couple of derelict houses that had once served as SPI offices. Lévi-Strauss managed to barter a few examples of the ceramics that the Caduveo were still making, but the experience was disappointing. “The Indians of Pitoko are completely civilized, in the most disturbing sense of the word,” wrote Dina, “that is to say very debased [très déculturés].”⁴⁸

On the final stretch of the journey, they set off at midnight to take advantage of the cooler temperatures, only to be hit by a violent tropical storm—two hours of lightning and thunder, pounding and flaring “like shells from an artillery barrage.”⁴⁹ The squall moved off, revealing the sodden outlines of a village up ahead: groups of wall-less dwellings—fibrous roofs mounted on wooden posts—standing on low hillocks. They were expected. News of their arrival had traveled on ahead through networks of indigenous herdsmen, spreading an age-old anxiety that the arrival of foreigners brought.

In many ways the Caduveo had reached a similar impasse to the Tibagy and the Kaingang—once an aristocratic tribe, dominating the region and enslaving the Terena, their less fortunate neighbors, they were now plagued by alcoholism, reduced to the impoverished life of Brazilian peasant ranchers. But there was a crucial difference. Elements of their material culture described by nineteenth-century travelers had survived the ravages of a predatory landgrab, the diseases that followed, as well as the Paraguayan War (1864-70), into which they had been coopted as cavalrymen.

The men were the sculptors, wrote Lévi-Strauss, the women the painters. ⁵⁰ Among their artifacts were decorated ceramics, necklaces fashioned from beaten pieces of silver, and sculpted figurines, sometimes used for worship, sometimes given to children as playthings. Most striking, though, were the patterns—once tattooed, now painted on the faces of the women and girls. Lévi-Strauss had seen the late-nineteenth-century photographs by the Italian explorer and ethnographer Guido Boggiani, who had spent more than a decade on Brazil’s far western borderlands before being killed in Paraguay by a tribe who believed he was a witch. But he had not expected to find Caduveo art still intact and actively practiced.

The women worked a fine bamboo spatula, tipped with jenipapo juice, producing clear lines that blackened on the face with oxidation. The patterns radiated from the mouth in scrolls and arabesques, then quartered the face with exquisite geometric motifs. As art, this was not the rough-cut primitivism that Lévi-Strauss would later document in the backlands of Brazil, but well-executed design, of a complexity and refinement that belied the squalid surroundings. At first he photographed them, but since they charged per image and demanded that he take a copious number of photos, he ended up feigning taking photographs and paying the fee, to preserve his film stock. He tried to draw the designs himself, and then handed out pieces of paper and got the women to reproduce them on the page, which they did without any difficulty whatsoever. He gathered several hundred, each alike, but none exactly the same—a register of S-shapes, whorls, crosses and opposed spirals, convex and concave arabesques. For Lévi-Strauss it was not so much the motifs themselves that were unique (some were in fact reminiscent of the Spanish baroque style, elements of which the Caduveo may have borrowed), but the way they were combined in alternating curvilinear themes. The women’s faces were a patchwork of slightly off-kilter symmetries and inversions that referenced each other with a hard-to-decipher logic.

So caught up in the Caduveo aesthetic world was Lévi-Strauss that the discomforts of travel off the beaten track began to fade: “Conditions are of course tough,” he wrote in a letter, updating his friend and patron Mário de Andrade. “The heat is always overwhelming in the Pantanal. Some nights in Nalike we can’t help shivering and the mosquitoes are as you would imagine. But there are so many interesting and admirable things here that other matters are not terribly important.”⁵¹

During his two-week stay, Lévi-Strauss took a series of close-ups of the women’s faces. On the older women, the designs play off wrinkles, the hollows of the cheeks, the creases on the forehead, like ornamental filigree on medieval parchment; while on the girls, pure lines swirl around the mouth with a seductive, flowerlike effect. There are also a couple of reels of film, a tantalizing glimpse backstage of his memoir, Tristes Tropiques. Only a few unsteady minutes of footage were shot, presented between silent-film-style explanatory text in Portuguese: Entardecer (Dusk), Festa da puberdade de Nalike (Nalike puberty celebration), Confecção de rede (Hammock making) and Pinturas de face (Face paintings). Black and white, shaky, slightly speeded up and at times overexposed, the footage has an antique vérité feel. A rapid opening pan across the village captures a glimpse of the backs of Lévi-Strauss and his French friend. They are dressed identically, looking like stereotypical nineteenth-century colonial expeditionists: white baggy overalls are fastened high up with a belt; hanging off the belt is a small leather sheath suitable for a hunting knife. The outfit is completed by sturdy hunting boots and sun helmets, of the type worn by Livingstone. Another shot has Dina Lévi-Strauss in animated conversation with one of the women. They seem to be talking about an object—perhaps a necklace—that Dina holds out between them.

The village looks more like a frontier campsite than anything resembling an indigenous settlement. A closer pan shows the eclectic cultural mix—inside the wall-less huts, a man sucks mate through a straw, a virtually naked woman weaves what looks like an ornamental belt, while in the background a figure dressed in cowboy gear sits by the campfire; as the camera turns toward him, he tilts his wide-rimmed cowboy hat to cover his face. More jerky footage has the women squatting together, drawing the disembodied designs on the sheets of paper that are scattered around them. An old woman in a tattered floral dress decorates her face using a pocket mirror; a younger, bare-breasted woman leans over a girl resting her head in her lap, applying jenipapo juice to the girl’s cheeks from a small pot at her side. The film ends with a final close-up of the most spectacular design—an old woman bedecked in jewelry. Her wrinkled face is evenly covered with dotted lines and scrolls, as if she were “peering out from behind a complicated ornamental screen.”⁵² Her stare back into the camera is unwavering—an unreadable blank, to which hostility, defiance, world-weariness, indifference, boredom or a simple unfamiliarity with the act of being filmed could equally be ascribed.

The trip had been a success. To the surprise of the French fazendeiros, who had considered the Indians alcoholic layabouts, Lévi-Strauss’s party arrived back from their expedition laden with superb indigenous artifacts, among them huge pottery jars, deerskins and wood carvings. From this point on, the French fazendeiros cultivated ties with the Caduveo, decorating their farmhouse with indigenous art. But the relationship ended in tragedy: ten years later one of the fazendeiros was killed by a local Indian. “It is unlikely that two bachelors were able to resist the charms of the young Indian girls,” Lévi-Strauss speculated, “when they saw them half-naked on feast days, their bodies patiently decorated with delicate black and blue scrolls which seemed to fit their skin like a sheath of precious lace.” Lévi-Strauss felt he bore some indirect responsibility for the death, for in the end the fazendeiro had been “not so much a victim of the Indians, as a victim of the mental confusion into which he had been plunged by the visit of a party of young anthropologists.”⁵³

More than the artifacts that he had collected, it was the Caduveo face designs that resonated with Lévi-Strauss. Over the following years he would come back to them often, writing articles and devoting a chapter of his memoir to his experiences. In a recent interview he described the women as “great artists.”⁵⁴ In spite of the sorry state of their culture, the Caduveo had clung on to something that he found both aesthetically appealing and intellectually challenging. But it would be many years before he had the tools to analyze them. While he was in Brazil he toyed with conventional, if ambitious, explanations, trying to connect Caduveo design to the patterns on the pottery that had turned up thousands of kilometers away on the vast island of Marajó, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon, a line of inquiry that he later abandoned. By the time he had reached his conclusions, the phenomenon had slipped into history. The village was abandoned ten years after Lévi-Strauss passed through, the tradition of face painting disappearing in the cultural turbulence of the frontier.

FOR THE LAST YEAR, Lévi-Strauss had been on a slow, arduous journey away from the West—from Paris to São Paulo, from the frontier towns to the pitiful indigenous reservations of Paraná, and then on to the Caduveo, whose traditional culture was in its last stages of unraveling. The next phase would finally deliver him into the classic fieldwork scenario he had been hankering after since leaving Europe—a tribe remote enough to display the trappings of authenticity, the fetishized objects of the Western imagination: penis sheaths, multicolored headdresses, nose feathers, lip ornaments and body paint. Despite their long contact with Silesian missionaries and the beginnings of an influx of Western tools, clothes and diseases, the Bororo still looked the part—particularly the men, whose athletic bodies were smeared with vegetable dye and decorated with shells, palm fronds and feathers. The Bororo’s highly ritualized lifestyle, their myths, their rich cosmology and material culture filled out the ethnographic possibilities for the young, ambitious anthropologist.

But Lévi-Strauss had to work hard for his prize. There were days in a steamer that took the Paraguay River’s twists and turns upstream to the regional capital of Cuiabá. From there the Lévi-Strausses traveled by truck through rough gold-prospecting camps, then, taking a half-abandoned road, dropped down to the São Lourenço River. The last phase of the journey descended into chaos. The truck battled a boggy, overgrown track, often becoming marooned in the mud or blocked by foliage. Between digging the truck out of the mud and shifting fallen trees, the team spent uncomfortable nights sleeping on the bare earth, kept dry by rubber mackintoshes doubling as groundsheets.⁵⁵ Most of the bridges had been burned out by bushfires, forcing them to ford streams in the truck or to punt across rivers on rafts. When they reached the São Lourenço River, where the first Bororo camps were said to be, they found only five empty huts, obscured in the mists of the valley. Exasperated, they fanned out in all directions, but found nothing. Their only contact was a pale fisherman who told them that yellow fever had recently spread through the area, scattering the villagers. The nearest Bororo settlement—the Kejara aldeia (village)—was some way upstream.

The expedition spent a week canoeing against a swift current powered by tropical downpours as they ascended the Rio Vermelho, a tributary of the São Lourenço. Upstream they spotted naked figures—Bororo tribesmen—in the distance. “It’s as if it were yesterday,” Lévi-Strauss remembered in a television interview he gave some thirty years after the event. “Camped on the riverside, we saw two, three shapes, rather red, on the edge of the water—they were the first Bororo that we laid eyes upon.”⁵⁶ The expedition members approached and tried to engage with them, but found that the only Portuguese word they seemed to know was fumo (tobacco). Communicating by gesture, they worked out that the Bororo village was but hours away. The tribesmen went on ahead to announce their imminent arrival, while Lévi-Strauss’s party embarked on the final leg of their journey.

Later that day, climbing the steep banks of the river, Lévi-Strauss at last found himself among the “virtuous savages” he had philosophized about, a 140-strong indigenous village with few outward signs of acculturation. He was overwhelmed by fatigue and excitement, “hunger, thirst and mental confusion.” He noticed the great huts, “not so much built as knotted together,” woven into a kind of giant garment, of “grassy velvetiness,” that protected their naked bodies.⁵⁷ Unlike the timid, broken indigenous peoples that Lévi-Strauss had already seen, the Bororo stood proud, glowing with a red pigment made from a mix of urucu seeds and animal fat, imprinted with black resin and dusted over with a mother-of-pearl powder. They laughed and joked as they stowed the expedition’s luggage in a corner of the twelve-meter-by-five-meter hut, where Lévi-Strauss and his wife would sleep alongside the shaman’s family and an elderly Bororo widow. (Dina, a slender, gamine figure who wore trousers and sported cropped hair, was apparently assumed to be a man by the Bororo, so special arrangements were not necessary.)⁵⁸ Lévi-Strauss was in a state of heightened sensitivity. “As I proceeded to settle into our corner of a large hut, I was soaking up these images, rather than grasping them intellectually,” he later recalled. ⁵⁹ He dozed off to the sounds of Bororo song—an elaborate ritual prelude to the eating of the irara, a type of badger that the expedition party had shot earlier and presented to the Bororo as a gift. Wind instruments, gravel-filled gourd rattles and the low chants of the men’s voices played out their rhythms, which Lévi-Strauss later wrote were as sophisticated and subtle as those coaxed by Europe’s finest conductors.⁶⁰

The choice of the village had been somewhat arbitrary—the fisherman who acted as a guide had been keen to visit the aldeia because he had heard that the Bororo grew tobacco, a crop that was not cultivated downstream. He was right, and at the end of the expedition they returned with three hundred tobacco plants given to them by the Bororo.⁶¹ On this somehow appropriate contingency rested Lévi-Strauss’s first real experience of ethnographic fieldwork. The material he gathered would stay with him for the rest of his life, reemerging at intervals. Much later, Salesian missionary accounts of Bororo myth would provide the central thread of the Mythologiques quartet that crowned his academic career.

During his stay of just three weeks, he documented a spectrum of Bororo ritual and cosmology—weddings, funerary rites and myths—and added to his collection of indigenous artifacts. “We were immersed in the wealth and fantasy of an exceptional culture . . . It was a society that had abolished time, and after all what greater nostalgia could we have than to abolish time and then to live in a sort of present tense which is a constantly revitalized past and preserved as it was dreamt in myth and belief,” Lévi-Strauss remembered in the 1960s, when he was interviewed in his office at the Collège de France.⁶²

Yet what caught his eye was something altogether more prosaic. As in the frontier zone, he became fascinated with the layout of the village—a circle of family huts around a central longhouse reserved for the men. Quizzing the Bororo through an interpreter, Lévi-Strauss surveyed each hut and plotted their relationships to one another. He drew diagrams in the earthen yard of the various imaginary dividing lines, the sectors they formed and the complex network of rights, duties, hierarchy and reciprocity through which they were defined.

The emergent scheme was involved, yet elegant. An invisible north- south axis divided the village into moieties (that is, two intermarrying descent groups); within the moieties were clans, and within the clans, a tripartite system of castelike grades. Marriage was permitted only between moieties and within grades, with a procession of men, once married, crossing the yard to live on the other side—in their in-laws’ huts. The village circle was then quartered by an east-west axis running parallel to the river, the upstreamers organizing the downstreamers’ funerals, and vice versa. What resulted was “a ballet in which two village moieties strive to live and breathe each through and for the other; exchanging women, possessions and services in fervent reciprocity; intermarrying their children, burying each other’s dead . . .”⁶³ So integral was this system to the Bororo that Silesian missionaries had learned early on that changing the village layout led to a rapid cultural meltdown.

Just as with the Caduveo face designs, Lévi-Strauss was struck by the geometry of human culture. In this small tribal settlement on a scrubby clearing in a remote corner of Mato Grosso, a set of rules—computerlike in their dispassionate symmetry—had evolved over time. Guided by a “smokescreen of institutions,” the Bororo lived out orderly lives.⁶⁴ What looked like a motley rural hamlet was in fact a precision machine. The circular-hut plans spread out across the vast central Brazilian plateau as a common feature of the Ge linguistic group. Lévi-Strauss could only hint at what this might mean in broader anthropological terms, but he would later look back on the Bororo with affection and an exaggerated sense of their influence on the development of his theories. In the early 1990s, he explained to a French documentary crew:

I have the feeling now when I try to reconstitute my intellectual history—it’s very difficult because I have a terrible memory—I have the feeling that I was always what later became known as “structuralist” even when I was a child. But meeting the Bororo who were the great theoreticians of structuralism—that was a godsend for me!⁶⁵

An old-fashioned ethnographic inventory survives on film, similar to the footage of the Caduveo, with the natives acting out life scenes for the camera: a Bororo pulling back the string on his bow (but not actually firing it); two men laboriously making fire by rotating a stick on a wooden base; a shuffling dance; Bororo men testing their physical strength by balancing 1.5-meter-high discs made of grasses and dried palm stalks on their heads; a canoeing scene. The flickering, speeded-up images carry the strange power of the amateur-shot silent film—a mystery, an emotional charge, a melancholy—reinforced by a fleeting glimpse of Lévi-Strauss himself. The camera tracks the Bororo as they paddle long, slender canoes down the river. For a few stray frames a figure in colonial garb appears leaning back on a branch, smoking a cigarette as he watches the canoes glide by.

IN NOVEMBER 1936, Lévi-Strauss and Dina sailed for Europe to winter in France. Stowed in the hold were crates of indigenous artifacts, sourced mainly from the Caduveo and the Bororo, with a handful of objects from the Terena (neighbors of the Caduveo) and the Kaingang. In one case was a set of Bororo bull-roarers, slender wooden boards tapered at each end and painted with arcs and dots. The bull-roarers made a low humming sound when spun from a length of twine—the drone of spirits greatly feared by the women. The Bororo had reluctantly traded them on the condition that Lévi-Strauss lock them in a chest and not open it until he had reached Cuiabá.

Along with the bull-roarers, the Lévi-Strausses had amassed a spectacular ethnographic collection of hides, headdresses and musical instruments from a poorly documented part of Brazil. Indiens du Matto Grosso⁶⁶ would be the first exhibition organized under the auspices of the Musée de l’Homme, although as the museum was not yet opened to visitors, the collection was put on display at the Wildenstein Gallery, at the corner of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the rue La Boétie. But perhaps there was something appropriate in the alternative arrangements—a year later the same gallery would host a major exhibition featuring leading surrealist artists.

According to Lévi-Strauss, the exhibition received “a polite appraisal,”⁶⁷ but a review in the Brazilian Jornal do Comércio was effusive:

Many intellectuals, travelers, artists and curious people visited the art gallery in the evening, admiring around a thousand objects—ceramics, skins, masks, hammocks, flutes, hunting bows and arrows and other examples of indigenous art gathered by the Strausses from their visit to the Bororo and other tribes. Professor Lévi-Strauss gave explanations of these objects fascinating to the visitors, who were astonished and seduced by the originality and the beauty of this exhibition.⁶⁸

Some of these objects—a shuttlecock, a funerary clarinet, a spectacular armadillo-claw pendant adorned with feathers, mother-of-pearl discs and porcupine quills—can still be seen today, in a glass case in the Musée du quai Branly. What remains striking are the colors of the decorative feathers: shocking reds and yellows that, after decades in storage, are still vivid enough to pierce the museum’s penumbra.

More than the exhibition, Lévi-Strauss’s first significant academic publication, “Contribution à l’étude de l’organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo”—a detailed analysis of the Bororo clan/moiety structure and its relationship to the village layout for the Journal de la Société des Américanistes⁶⁹—signaled his entry into the small world of 1930s French anthropology. Marcel Mauss, no less, hailed the Lévi-Strausses as “the great hopes for French study of the Americas.”⁷⁰ The article, which appeared late in 1936, was greeted with excitement by specialists and would travel widely, being remarked on in Brazil, the United States and France. Even hardened field-workers, like the great German anthropologist Curt Unckel, who had adopted the native name Nimuendajú and spent years on solo expeditions into central Brazil, were intrigued. Nimuendajú wrote him an encouraging letter saying that he hoped Lévi-Strauss would have the opportunity to carry out a proper long-term study in the future. He also wrote to Robert Lowie in the United States about Lévi-Strauss and his work, opening up a link to American academia that would soon prove vital.

Lévi-Strauss later said that the enthusiasm around his early work was not so much due to its “slim merit”⁷¹ as its good timing—South America was the new frontier of western-hemisphere anthropology, and U.S. scholars were looking with interest at the work that was beginning to come out of Brazil. In truth he was disappointed by the brevity of his contact with the Caduveo and the Bororo, and modest about the significance of his findings. Replying to Nimuendajú, he explained: “My stay among the Bororo was unfortunately very short; I could only get an idea of certain problems, but I need to return and stay for a long period this time, to try and solve them. I hope you will excuse the poverty of my responses”—a self-deprecating tone that, although absent from Tristes Tropiques, he would later cultivate when questioned about the quality of his fieldwork.⁷²

On more sensitive issues, where the building up of trust was crucial, his fleeting visits were not enough. Bartering for artifacts sometimes degenerated into farce. When Lévi-Strauss began negotiating for a hairpiece—the only object passed from mother to daughter among the Bororo—the women flew into a rage.⁷³ He tried, and failed, to collect a full set of physical anthropological data from the Caduveo and the Bororo (a part of his research that was written out of subsequent accounts), as he explained in an interview with a journalist from the Brazilian newspaper O Jornal on his return from the field:

We collected only a few anthropometric measurements, and only from male Indians, because the women were shy and reserved. It was impossible to obtain measurements of skeletons and bones from both the Caduveo and the Bororo of Rio Vermelho . . . Blood type was also not obtained, because the Indians refused to cooperate, and they also made it difficult to obtain photographic negatives as they feared death and curses.⁷⁴

These early, impressionistic spells of fieldwork set the tone of Lévi-Strauss’s whole method as it later developed. He combined rapid assimilation of situations and ethnographic materials with boldly intuitive model-building. Time and again these hit-and-run tactics would pay off, bringing out fresh perspectives. Anthropologists could get bogged down in detail, trapped inside their own stale arguments; after years of patient cultural excavation, there was a tendency to lose sight of the overall design. In contrast, Lévi-Strauss captured a culture through fragments, filling the gaps in his mind, conjuring models as if from thin air.

IN MARCH 1937, Lévi-Strauss returned with his wife to São Paulo for his third and final academic year, determined to make the most of what he knew would be his last spell in Brazil. While making plans for a major, long-term ethnographic expedition, he went on a number of smaller trips, on one occasion even fitting in some impromptu fieldwork. In July, he went on the road with Jean Maugüé and René Courtin, a law graduate from the University of Montpellier who had just joined the French mission. Traveling in Courtin’s new Ford, their goal was to go “as far as his car would take us” in a roughly northerly direction out of São Paulo.⁷⁵ They dressed for the part: Maugüé in boots, a cotton cloth shirt, a wide-brimmed straw hat, armed with a knife and a revolver; Courtin in flannel trousers and a woolen jacket, with a shotgun and cartridges “as if he were about to set off on a hunting trip in the Cévennes”; while Lévi-Strauss was in his familiar colonial explorer’s uniform with his camera about his neck and a “Sherlock Holmes-style” sun helmet.⁷⁶

They drove up through the coffee plantations of Campinas, on to Uberlândia and across the rapids of the Paranaíba River. From there Courtin’s Ford broke free, motoring across semiarid plains studded with giant anthills. Stranded in empty fields, they passed by the building blocks of Goiânia, the future state capital. A hundred or so half-built houses stood alongside a hotel—a massive cement box dumped on the red flats. It was a brutalist architectural statement that took Lévi-Strauss aback: “Only the fear of disaster could justify the existence of the block-house,” he later wrote, a disaster that “had, in fact, occurred, and the silence and immobility all around was its ominous aftermath.”⁷⁷ They pushed on to the diamond-trading center of Goiás Velho, a baroque town of cobbled streets and pastel-fronted Italianate eighteenth-century houses set in rolling palm-topped hills. Farther north still, the road petered out at the Araguaia River, a major waterway that disgorged into the mouth of the Amazon a farther thirteen kilometers downstream.

It was there, on the riverbank, that they came across a small outpost of semiacculturated Karaja Indians. Karaja villages spread up the immense Araguaia Valley, across the world’s largest interfluvial island, the two-million-hectare Ilha do Bananal. For centuries the Karaja had moved through this region, fishing, hunting turtles and cultivating maize, manioc and watermelons in forest gardens. Now some groups had dropped down into the outskirts of Brazilian frontier towns, hawking artisanal wares to passing travelers. Lévi-Strauss sat down with them and tried to communicate, apparently with some success. “I marveled at how he could decipher gestures that for Courtin and me were merely picturesque,” remembered Maugüé.⁷⁸ While Lévi-Strauss asked questions and took notes, a timid little girl fashioned two clay dolls with giant phalluses for Courtin and Maugüé. Lévi-Strauss collected several other examples of the unbaked dolls, with their black wax hair, bark loincloths and ballooning thighs. He was impressed by the formal similarities between these dolls and statuettes dug up in prehistoric Aurignacian culture, also drawing parallels to short, distended thighs found in Mexican Gualupita terra-cotta figures.⁷⁹ He took pictures—one of a Karaja woman in a loose patterned dress inspecting a doll; another of a native woman at work, sitting on fibrous mat with a knife, a pot of dye and a ball of string lying about her.

After a few days among the Karaja, they turned the car around. On the return trip, Courtin’s Ford, which had battled from town to town down fifteen hundred kilometers of rutted tracks more normally used by mule trains and oxcarts, began to deteriorate. The front suspension snapped, leaving the engine balancing on the axle. They managed to make it a hundred kilometers farther before carrying out makeshift repairs in a small town where a mechanic fitted a strip of metal to hold up the engine. Then it was an anxious six-hundred-kilometer slog home. As the car bumped its way through São Paulo state, Maugüé caught a glimpse of his companions. “From the back of the car, I watched Lévi-Strauss, sitting beside Courtin,” he remembered. “His sober expression nonetheless betrayed the jubilation we shared on being back in the city with all its comforts and above all a bathroom.”⁸⁰

AS LÉVI-STRAUSS set his sights on more intensive fieldwork, the political turbulence of the 1930s was already threatening to intervene. In the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the Nazi-styled Integralists were goose-stepping in uniforms emblazoned with a swastika-like emblem, the sigma (Σ), the mathematical sign of the integral. They churned out crude anti-Semitic propaganda, with books like Brazil: Colony of Bankers and The São Paulo Synagogue, and branded refugees from Hitler as “human garbage.” In a bizarre ethnographic reference, they hailed one another with a strong-arm salute, accompanied by the word anauê, a native Tupi greeting. To the far left, communist agitators threatened insurrection, staging wildcat strikes and violent protests. President Getúlio Vargas was adopting an increasingly authoritarian path through the morass. After being courted in Europe and brought over to teach in Brazil, the French were now viewed with suspicion. Lévi-Strauss’s links to French socialism, as well as his connection to the well-known leftist and antifascist campaigner Paul Rivet at the Musée de l’Homme, put him in a particularly sensitive position. “We had interminable difficulties renewing our contracts,” remembered Maugüé.⁸¹

In France, the pendulum was moving in the other direction. Listening to the news on shortwave radio, Lévi-Strauss was elated to learn of the victory of the socialist Front populaire and the ministerial post of Georges Monnet, for whom he had worked as a secretary in the 1920s. He was expecting to receive the call to work for Monnet and, had it come, Lévi-Strauss later recalled, “I would have boarded the first outward-bound ship.”⁸² In retrospect, it was a fork in the road: “My former comrades had forgotten me. Events, the new course my life was taking, did the rest . . .”⁸³ In the historical cauldron of the mid-1930s, Lévi-Strauss’s political aspirations died at the very moment that his career as an anthropologist was lifting off.