Claude Levi-Strauss

LÉVI-STRAUSS ARRIVED BACK in Paris toward the end of March 1939, with a post as a teacher at the Lycée Henri-IV held for him for the autumn term. For the last five years he had been on the move—crisscrossing the Atlantic, wandering the wastes of central Brazil. He had returned with a second collection of indigenous artifacts, thousands of photographs, as well as a stack of field notes, still smelling of the creosote he doused his canteens in to protect them from termites. Now, at thirty years old, it was time to take stock, exhibit his collections, put his notes in order and begin writing up his thesis.

In his absence, the Musée de l’Homme had opened as a part of the 1937 Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. In retrospect, the exhibition had been a foretaste of what was to come. The colossal swastika-draped German pavilion designed by Albert Speer had faced the equally monolithic Soviet pavilion, with its giant statue of peasant workers holding aloft a hammer and sickle. Ironically, Speer had taken the Grand Prix for his model of the Nuremberg rally grounds.

Installed at the Musée de l’Homme, Lévi-Strauss unpacked the half dozen crates he had shipped from Brazil and laid out some seven hundred objects that he had exchanged for colored beads and lengths of fabric. Coming mainly from the Nambikwara, they lacked the theater of his earlier haul. In place of the Bororo bull-roarers, ornamental rattles and clarinets were nose feathers, chipped gourds and rough-weaved baskets. After surveying his collection, he began the painstaking process of sorting and labeling each object, however prosaic, preparing it for display in the new, professional environment of Rivet’s museum.

Perhaps as a counterweight to the rather dry and bureaucratic cataloging exercise, Lévi-Strauss used his spare time to make a start on a novel, a “vaguely Conradian” tale with an ethnographic angle. Based on a newspaper report he had read, the plot was to involve a cargo cult-like situation: a group of refugees would use a phonograph to dupe a tribe on a Pacific island into believing their gods were about to return to Earth. All that remains is the title, Tristes Tropiques, the lyrical description of a sunset, written on board the Mendoza en route to Brazil, which would later be recycled for his memoirs, and a handful of pages in Lévi-Strauss’s archive held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The pages follow the character Paul Thalamas as he sets off on a voyage to the tropics, just as Lévi-Strauss had done a few years before. The extract is intriguing, combining melodrama—“He breathed deeply” was Lévi-Strauss’s opening sentence—with awkwardly introduced philosophizing: “In a vague way, Paul Thalamas turned his thoughts to Berkeley and the famous theory in which the English bishop tries to prove the relativity of our visual perceptions, by the apparent differences in the size of the moon at the zenith and on the horizon.”² Clearly Lévi-Strauss had not yet mastered the flow of fiction, but who knows what he might have been able to achieve had he plowed his formidable intellectual energies into a literary career instead of an academic one. What the extract does show is that Lévi-Strauss’s modus operandi was the same whatever he turned his hand to—a very Gallic blend of drama and philosophy.

Engrossed in his work at the museum and struggling with his novel, Lévi-Strauss seemed strangely disconnected from the events brewing across Europe. “Did you feel that the war was coming?” he was asked in the 1980s. “No,” he replied. “No more than I sensed the dangers of Hitler or the Fascist threat. I was like most people, totally blind.”⁵ Nor did the mounting threats to Europe’s Jewish population strike a personal chord. As German Jews continued to flee across the border into France, Lévi-Strauss explained away Nazi anti-Semitism as petit bourgeois jealousy against Jewish bankers who had profited from the era’s high inflation rates. The ongoing persecution he likened to a kind of natural disaster to be weathered—like a volcanic eruption—rather than some fundamental, catastrophic social change.⁶

Lévi-Strauss’s second exhibition never took place. As he finished documenting his collections, war broke out. The forlorn wail of sirens sounded across Paris skies as civilians went through the paces of air raid drills; barricades and checkpoints sprang up along the boulevards; soldiers piled sandbags high around the city’s famous monuments and carried artwork into storage. For Lévi-Strauss, the drift toward war was accompanied by personal upheaval. In the spring of 1939, he separated from Dina. An eleven-year marriage, a good proportion of it spent in Brazil, was over. The couple had worked closely together, enduring the hazards and pleasures of backland travel, the thrill and tedium of ethnographic fieldwork. Seventy years after they had split, I asked Lévi-Strauss what had happened. At the age of ninety-eight, he spoke in short sentences, with long pauses in between. “She lived in her head,” he told me. “I never knew what she was thinking.” He went on to hint at other problems. Sometime after they had divorced he had been told of the existence of “romantic letters” between Dina and Mário de Andrade.⁷

By September, British Expeditionary Forces began arriving in northern France, marching over fields still pitted with the divots left from the First World War. French conscripts dug trenches and constructed shelters from the Channel down to the Ardennes, trying to paper over defenses to the north of the Maginot Line. Lévi-Strauss was drafted. He has described his war experience as a kind of continuation of fieldwork. Just as he was settling back into Paris, to the museum, his writing desk and the prospect of the teaching job in the autumn, he was on the move again. Over the next months there would be more travel to uncertain destinations, more bivouacking and tinned food, boredom and discomfort.

He spent the first months of the drôle de guerre censoring telegrams for the postal ministry (“utter buffoonery”⁸) before he asked to be trained as a liaison officer for the incoming British Expeditionary Forces. His English was rudimentary, but he managed to pass the exams and was posted behind the tail of the Maginot Line on the Luxembourg border. In the months leading up to the German invasion, there was little to do. During the spring he whiled away his time on long hikes through the surrounding wooded fields. It was on one of these excursions, at the beginning of May, that he claims to have had his first, sketchy intimations of the philosophical basis of structuralism. Gazing at a bunch of dandelions, he fell into intense intellectual contemplation. He examined the gray halo of a seed head with its hundreds of thousands of filaments sculpted into a perfect sphere. How was it that this plant, along with all others, had come to such a regularized, geometric conclusion? “It was there that I found the organizing principle of my thought,” he later remembered.⁹ The dandelion was the result of the play of its own structural properties, calibrated into a unique and instantly recognizable form. Subtle variations, changes at a deep genetic level, could give rise to other forms, the different species that multiplied through nature. The idea that culture, like nature, could have its own structuring principles—hidden, yet ultimately determining, like the genetic codes that produced the geometry of nature—would inform much of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent work, as he began his analysis of sociological/cultural phenomena such as kinship, totemism and myth.

Lévi-Strauss was awoken from his intellectual reveries by the dramatic opening of Germany’s westward offensive. With news of strikes into Belgium and Holland on the airwaves, a little to the north of where Lévi-Strauss was stationed, columns of tanks sped down the narrow lanes of the Ardennes Forest. Crossing the Meuse at Sedan, German panzer divisions punched effortlessly through the French defenses, leaving a trail of dust and diesel fumes as they broke into open countryside.

The surprising ease of the German conquest traumatized the French. “It was horrible . . . ,” remembered Jean Rouch, who would go on to become a renowned ethnographic filmmaker. “We discovered that what we had learned at school—the invincibility of the French army—was false. The old officers were afraid and were escaping. There was not a real battle. In just one month the whole of France was occupied. We were ashamed to have lost the war.” Then a student of civil engineering, Rouch spent the first months of the occupation traveling around France by bicycle from the Marne River to the Massif Central, blowing up bridges to slow the German advance.¹⁰

With the German blitzkrieg penetrating deep into French territory, Lévi-Strauss was relieved by a Scots regiment, which arrived with its own set of liaison officers. Lévi-Strauss’s group set off in search of their corps, tracking them down to a village in the Sarthe. “It probably saved our lives,” he remembered, “for the [Scots] regiment was decimated a few days later.”¹¹ In the confused weeks that followed, Lévi-Strauss found himself caught up in huge movements of people across France. Cars weaved cross-country through the trees to avoid the lengthening traffic jams. Streams of refugees choked all routes south, trying to outpace the Germans’ spectacular advances. Overnight, eight million were on the move. The historian Gaston Roupnel watched the catastrophe unfold:

I started Histoire et destin [History and Destiny, his last book] at the very beginning of July 1940. In my little village of Gevrey Chambertin, I had just seen waves of refugees go past along the main road, the whole sorry exodus of unfortunates, in cars, in carts, on foot, a miserable muddle of people, all the wretchedness of the roads, and mixed up with all this were the troops, soldiers without their weapons . . . and this great panic, this was France!¹²

Lévi-Strauss’s corps traveled by rail and cattle truck, from the Sarthe through Corrèze and Aveyron as their officers bickered over whether to head for Bordeaux and surrender to the Germans or escape to the Mediterranean. Fortunately, they opted for the south and the trip ended in the relative safety of Béziers. They were quartered on the Larzac plateau. After a disorderly retreat, Lévi-Strauss had miraculously landed on his own doorstep, near the family home in the Cévennes, where his parents had already taken refuge.

He was moved with his corps on to Montpellier. There he left his barracks in search of work at the university, offering his services as an examiner in philosophy for the upcoming baccalaureate examinations. He was hired and, after being demobilized, divided his time between the university and his family home. In Montpellier he met up with René Courtin again, his traveling companion in Brazil. Courtin was in the process of setting up a Resistance network, and after the war would be one of the founders of Le Monde.

Lévi-Strauss had escaped unscathed, his only experience of the fighting being the splintering of tiles overhead when his position was strafed by German Stukas during the retreat. He was secure in Vichy France, with family nearby and a university job. Yet by the beginning of September he was courting danger once more. He traveled up to Vichy to ask to be reassigned to his old job at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Just as French Jews were escaping south, Lévi-Strauss requested to be sent back north, into Nazi-occupied territory. It was an extraordinary move, given the times. In France forty thousand foreign Jews were already interned in camps—makeshift wooden huts in muddy fields, which froze during the winter.¹³ Although official persecution of French-born Jews had not yet begun, the screws were tightening under the Nazi occupation.

In the 1980s Lévi-Strauss claimed that it was his “lack of imagination” that led him on this potentially disastrous attempt to return to Paris. “That helped me during my fieldwork,” he told Didier Eribon. “I was unaware of the danger.”¹⁴ Scarcely believing such an offhand reply, I went back over this with him. “I did know that the Jews were threatened,” he told me, “but I thought you had to hide in the most direct, thorough way possible, by carrying on as normal.”¹⁵ Fortunately for Lévi-Strauss, the official dealing with the request, the director of secondary education, refused to send anyone with such an obviously Jewish name back into occupied France, suggesting a college in Perpignan instead. When Lévi-Strauss arrived in Perpignan, a new mood was in the air. Colleagues were wary, studiously avoiding the subject of the Jewish situation and the Nazi race laws. A gym teacher, who privately sympathized with Lévi-Strauss’s position, became his only confidant.

After only a few weeks in Perpignan, Lévi-Strauss returned to Montpellier, where he taught what would turn out to be the last philosophy classes of his career for a preparatory course at the École polytechnique. It turned into a purely ritualistic exchange between a set of students with no interest in philosophy and Lévi-Strauss, who had already mentally fled the discipline for anthropology. He read out his lecture notes against the hubbub of students chatting among themselves.

Outside classes he caught up on his reading. One book in particular, Catégories matrimoniales et relations de proximité dans la Chine ancienne (Matrimonial Categories and Kin Relations in Ancient China), written by the doyen of francophone Far Eastern studies, Marcel Granet, struck a chord, setting in motion a train of thought that would follow him into exile. Granet was the leading sinologist of his day, studying Chinese classical texts, traditional numerology and feudalism. Catégories matrimoniales was one of the first attempts to rigorously map out classical Chinese kinship relations. Lévi-Strauss had already grappled with kinship in Brazil, observing the Bororo’s fine-tuned moiety system and the small, densely interrelated nomadic families of the Nambikwara. Unlike Lévi-Strauss’s fumbling efforts to pin down their significance, Granet had tried to move beyond description. His goal was to unveil the very mechanics of kin systems, to find a set of objective rules that underpinned what at first glance appeared to be merely the arbitrary outcome of tradition. His book drew together concepts that Lévi-Strauss would later revisit: the symmetry of kinship systems as a kind of mathematical inevitability; the incest taboo as a positive prohibition—a magnetic field of repulsion propelling a system of exchange. Granet also hinted at universality (albeit through an evolutionist paradigm), drawing parallels between ancient Chinese systems and present-day Australian Aboriginal arrangements. The arguments were dense. There were complex diagrams—spirals inside cones, stars embedded in circles, crisscrossing arrows. “I was spellbound,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled.¹⁶ Yet he was also frustrated. He found Granet’s solutions obscure and overly elaborate; complexity had generated yet more complexity; untidy data could be described only by invoking baroque rules. The goal, which would remain a lifelong quest for Lévi-Strauss, was to descend to the next level of abstraction, into a clarifying world beyond description, a purer universe of simple imperatives.

Three weeks later, Lévi-Strauss was fired under the first Jewish Statute introduced by the Vichy government on October 3, 1940. He returned to his parents’ house, this time with some sense of the very real danger that he and his family were in. “I already felt myself to be potential fodder for the concentration camp,” he later confessed.¹⁷ He entertained romantic notions of being able to survive on the run, scavenging in the countryside, sleeping rough, Nambikwara-style, roaming the Cévennes. But inevitably thoughts turned toward exile. After Georges Dumas intervened to secure him a new posting at the University of São Paulo, another spell in Brazil was an option.¹⁸ He might even have been able to resume fieldwork among the Nambikwara. The nomadic period had shown him only one aspect of Nambikwara life; intensive study of the sedentary camps during the wet season would fill out the picture.

Lévi-Strauss traveled back up to Vichy, where the Brazilian embassy had set up offices in a cramped ground-floor room. There, in an episode later recounted in Tristes Tropiques, he tried, but failed, to renew his visa. In an excruciating scene the ambassador held the stamp in midair, ready to hammer it onto Lévi-Strauss’s open passport, but—reminded by a zealous official of the new rules in place—could not follow through. Lévi-Strauss left empty-handed.

With his options dwindling, he received a letter that turned out to be as life-defining as Bouglé’s phone call had been six years earlier. It was an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. Founded after the First World War, the New School had been taking in European intellectuals under threat from the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. With the outbreak of the Second World War, it began receiving waves of intellectuals from across Europe fleeing war and persecution. Lévi-Strauss was fortunate to have the backing of both Alfred Métraux and Robert Lowie, who had been impressed by his work on the Bororo, as well as family connections in the States—his aunt Aline, widow of the painter Henry Caro-Delvaille, raised money through a wealthy friend to support the application. After the offer Lévi-Strauss wrote to Dina, who was also Jewish, saying that if she wanted to get out of France she could travel with him as his wife.¹⁹ She elected to stay on and ended up playing a role in the Resistance. Lévi-Strauss’s parents would remain in Vichy France, stranded in their holiday house in the Cévennes and unable to return to the rue Poussin apartment until after the war.

Lévi-Strauss could now enter the States; the problem lay on the French side. As the war progressed, leaving the country was becoming more and more difficult. After the occupation of the north, some Jews and perceived undesirables hiked over the Pyrenees, traveling across Spain and into Portugal to the neutral port of Lisbon, from where they packed onto Cunard liners or, money permitting, took the newly established twelve-hour Pan American Clipper air service. The other route, out through Marseille, was more direct, but still involved mountains of paperwork: affidavits of support, proof of job in the host country, visas, proof of passage and Vichy exit papers, with each document depending on the others in a dispiriting bureaucratic chain.

Artists Max Ernst and André Masson, writer Arthur Koestler and Nobel physicist Otto Meyerhof, among thousands of others, gathered in Marseille to get their papers in order and find a berth out of Europe. They were aided by the inspired work of the American Quaker Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee, another privately funded organization aimed at rescuing European intellectuals from the deteriorating situation in Europe. Vichy military police scoured the port with orders to arrest any “subversive” who could not produce proof of passage. People had begun disappearing. Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, who sailed with Lévi-Strauss, described lives “hanging by slender threads” in Marseille, where the “talent and expertise of Paris . . . in the days of her prime” were reduced to “hunted, terribly tired men at the limit of their nervous resources.”²⁰ Despite the difficulties, the artistic communities that would soon set up in exile—in New York, Buenos Aires and Mexico City—were already forming before they set sail. André Breton and assorted surrealists along with Victor Serge and Varian Fry rented the eighteen-room Villa Air-Bel, where they hosted exhibitions, “auctions,” theater and comedy nights.

The unusually mild autumn of 1940 gave way to one of the coldest winters on record. A biting mistral blew off the Massif Central, streaming down the Rhône Valley. Snow dusted the Mediterranean. Shortages of food and heating oil signaled the beginning of the long, hard slog through the war years. His papers now in order, Lévi-Strauss came down from the Cévennes and did the rounds of Marseille’s drafty shipping offices. He heard rumors that a ship was about to leave for Martinique and tracked it down to the Compagnie des transports maritimes—the very same shipping company that he and his academic colleagues had used on half a dozen trips to and from Brazil. A company official who remembered Lévi-Strauss from the Brazil days confirmed that a ship was setting sail for the Caribbean the next month, but tried to dissuade him from taking it, being “unable to tolerate the idea that one of his former first-class passengers should be transported like livestock.”²¹

Lévi-Strauss packed up the remains of his ethnographic materials—notes, card indexes, a travel diary, maps, diagrams, photographs and negatives—for the trip to America. With the help of a smuggler, the crate was spirited into the hold. On March 25, 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, ushered down the quai de la Joliette and out of the country by a fascist guard of dishonor:

We went on board between two rows of helmeted gardes mobiles with sten guns in their hands, who cordoned off the quayside, preventing all contact between the passengers and their relatives or friends who had come to say goodbye, and interrupting leave-takings with jostling and insults. Far from being a solitary adventure, it was more like the deportation of convicts.²²

A creaking steamer (“a can of sardines with a cigarette butt stuck in it,” according to Serge²³), the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle was loaded up with 350 “undesirables”—“a kind of floating concentration camp”²⁴ of German, Austrian, Czech, Spanish and French Jews and political agitators whose paperwork had finally come through. Among the hundreds jammed into the hold on makeshift pallets and straw mattresses were Breton, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, German novelist Anna Seghers and Victor Serge, onetime colleague of Lenin. Serge, with his “clean-shaven, delicate-featured face” and a “strangely asexual” voice, confounded Lévi-Strauss’s image of the virile revolutionary.²⁵

Arrangements were primitive. Two sets of unventilated cubicles had been rigged up—one on the port side for men, the other on the starboard side for women. A zinc trough leading off into the sea served as the toilet, a miserable dribble of water as the shower. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss told me that the mood was not bleak, but excited—“more like setting out on an adventure.”²⁶ A surviving photo from the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle’s deck bears this out. Behind a heavy coil of ship’s rope young women smile gaily, chatting and smoking. Men look confidently back into the lens, and a couple of toddlers have been hoisted up at the back of the group, appearing against a backdrop of the open sea.

Through his connections with the Compagnie des transports maritimes, Lévi-Strauss managed to secure one of the bunk beds in the only two cabins on the vessel. He shared with an Austrian metal magnate and a wealthy Martinican returning home (“the only person on board who could reasonably be presumed to be neither a Jew nor a foreigner nor an anarchist”²⁷). The last bunk was occupied by a mysterious North African with a Degas stashed away in his suitcase. While most of the other passengers were treated with disdain, he seemed to have an inside track with all the officials throughout the trip. The man claimed that, after a voyage of several months, he would be spending only a few days in New York. Lévi-Strauss later learned through photos published with his obituary in 1974 that he was Henri Smadja, a French-Tunisian Jew who ended up editing Combat, the Resistance paper founded during the war by Albert Camus. It remains unclear exactly what he was doing aboard the refugee ship.

The Capitaine Paul-Lemerle docked briefly at Oran in Algeria and at Casablanca before skirting the African coast for Dakar. While waiting to go ashore in Casablanca, Lévi-Strauss was surprised to hear André Breton give his name to passport control ahead of him in the queue. Breton was by then famous in France, Lévi-Strauss virtually unknown. Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss immediately introduced himself and the two became friends. They were both serious intellectual aesthetes, both cool and somewhat formal in their approach to the world, yet intrigued by a midcentury modernist infatuation with the primitive and the subconscious. Deprived of books, they passed the rest of the voyage chatting on deck, handing each other long, densely theoretical notes, exchanging ideas on art, surrealism and aesthetic appreciation. Lévi-Strauss wrote a detailed commentary on Breton’s doctrine of spontaneous creativity, trying to resolve the contradictions between surrealist “automatic” art (in which the artist simply writes, draws or paints with no preplanned ideas, guided by chance and random events) on the one hand, and the idea of artistic technique or expertise on the other. How could artistic creativity express itself through what was merely a reflex of the subconscious? He concluded with the notion of “irrational awareness” (prise de conscience irrationelle)—a kind of creative inspiration that the true artist smuggles into a spontaneous work of art. In reply, Breton wrote of the “para-erotic” aesthetic pleasure derived from art, which distinguished it from impulsive doodles, and concluded that Lévi-Strauss’s idea of irrational awareness might itself be produced at a subconscious or “pre-conscious” level.²⁸ Even in the difficult circumstances of the crossing, Breton was always on the lookout for random aesthetic events. At one point he was struck by the combination of a hanging carcass of an ox that had been slaughtered on board, flags fluttering over the ship’s aft and the rising sun. “Their somewhat hermetic assembly, in April 1941,” observed Breton, “seemed rich with meaning.”²⁹

Conditions became primitive as the ship descended into the tropics. Rising temperatures forced everyone up onto deck, now a clutter of clotheslines, children’s nurseries, bedding and open-air dining arrangements. Passengers began using the toilets in the small hours of the morning so as to avoid “collective squatting”; the dribble of water in the shower boxes turned to steam in the tropical air.³⁰ Breton’s aristocratic sensibilities were tested to the limits. “André Breton, who was very much out of place dans cette galère [in this hell],” wrote Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, “strode up and down the few empty places left on deck; wrapped in his thick nap overcoat, he looked like a blue bear.”³¹ Lévi-Strauss, now a veteran of primitive living conditions and in any case traveling in the relative luxury of a cabin, was philosophical. “I learned some anthropology there,”³² he quipped to a Washington Post reporter decades later.

On the run in to Martinique, relief spread through the decks at the prospect of landfall and the first bath in weeks. Hopes were short-lived. A crude French nationalism reigned in the colony, loyal to Vichy France, rather than any notion of embryonic resistance. Paranoid officials, brooding in their colonial outpost, finally had a group of “traitors” on whom to vent their anger and frustration. As soon as the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle docked, heavily armed troops in tropical kit flooded onto the decks. There were show interrogations, consisting mainly of eyeballing and shouting abuse, followed by internment in prison camps.

Breton was singled out for special treatment. He was forced to pay a nine-thousand-franc “deposit” to enter Martinique, which was subsequently revoked, although he ended up paying fifteen hundred francs in “internment fees” for the pleasure of being imprisoned in the former leper colony Pointe-Rouge. When he presented his invitations to speak in America, one official scoffed, “A fat lot of good that’ll do the Americans.” Breton was eventually freed with the parting shot: “We don’t need any Surrealist or hyperrealist poets in Martinique.”³³

Lévi-Strauss was accused of being “a Jewish Freemason in the pay of the Americans” and was apparently told that “so-called French Jews are worse than foreign Jews.”³⁴ But his luck held. At the request of the ship’s captain, who had served as chief officer on the Brazil trips, he was spared the rigors of the camps and was, along with the Martinican and Smadja, allowed ashore. They toured the island in an old Ford, grinding up mountain roads in low gear past fern fronds and fruit trees set against pale mists and volcanic earth. Lévi-Strauss found the landscapes pleasing, more in tune with his idealized vision of the tropics than Brazil’s mix of the baking cerrado and the claustrophobia of the forests.

From Martinique, he took a Swedish banana boat to San Juan, Puerto Rico. For the first time he sensed America on the air, albeit from the edge of the Caribbean:

I breathed in the warm smell of car paint and wintergreen . . . those two olfactory poles between which stretches a whole range of American comfort, from cars to lavatories, by way of radio sets, sweets and toothpaste. I tried to guess what the girls in the drug-stores with their lilac dresses and mahogany hair were thinking about, behind their mask-like make-up.³⁵

Lévi-Strauss’s official welcome, though, was hostile. His immigration paperwork was already out of date, and while he cabled New York for fresh assurances, he was placed under a loose form of house arrest, accompanied by two bored police officers wherever he went. Three weeks passed before the Americans could arrange for an FBI expert to inspect his crate of fieldwork notes. The agent, though highly suspicious of a card-index reference to Karl von den Steinen’s classic work on Mato Grosso, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens, eventually passed the collection. Months after being bundled on the refugee ship in Marseille, Lévi-Strauss was cleared to proceed to New York.

As he embarked on the last leg of his voyage, another Jewish intellectual, Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, was fleeing Europe by boat. After passing the wreckage of the recently sunk Bismarck, Jakobson’s liner plowed across the North Atlantic, bound for New York. The two men’s subsequent meeting would mark the beginning of a new intellectual matrix; two disciplines—anthropology and linguistics—would come together, as the study of kinship and phonemics, of systems of sound and marriage, became unlikely bedfellows.

AT THE END OF MAY 1941, Lévi-Strauss disembarked in New York with his crate of ethnographic materials, a few personal effects and a small amount of currency. The long journey into exile that had begun a year before in the deceptively tranquil woods behind the Maginot Line was finally over. He checked in at the New School for Social Research, which had by then adopted the role of a welcoming center, helping disoriented exiles find their feet. By the time Lévi-Strauss arrived, some thirty thousand French men and women had fled to New York. Some were émigrés de luxe—the rich avoiding the inconvenience of war—others penniless artists or academics. French newspapers, journals and a small book publishing industry were taking root; there were concerts, exhibitions and plays featuring French artists.

In a reprise of May 1939, Lévi-Strauss found that he had a salaried summer ahead of him before classes began in the autumn. Through an unseasonably humid spring, he set out to explore the city. He strolled up and down the avenues, ducked into cross streets, hopping from Chinatown to the Puerto Rican neighborhood around West Twenty-third Street; from Little Italy to the garment district off Union Square and the rows of sweatshops, still “charged with the stale odours from Central Europe.” He visited the fading Upper West Side and its grand turn-of-the-century apartments, now subdivided for poorer tenants, and walked through streets of East Side mansions. “One changed country every few blocks,” Lévi-Strauss later wrote, marveling at the novelty of an urban multiculturalism that European cities would only begin to experience on the postwar collapse of empire.³⁶

As he walked, he turned his ethnographer’s eye on New York. Aside from the cluster of skyscrapers around Wall Street, he found the urban landscape “astonishingly slack.”³⁷ Manhattan was not yet the corridor of high-rises that it would become, and in the shadow of that era’s tallest buildings lay a mishmash of villagelike residential areas, cottages, redbrick apartment blocks, greenery and vacant lots. Rio had been quaint, out of date—a tropical version of nineteenth-century Paris. In New York, the temporal was warped and bent, its social fabric rent by immigration, money and mobility. It was not so much modern as multilayered, a riveting mix of retro and provincial American styles, promiscuous European and Asian influences, and the hint of what was to come: “obscene” advertising for deodorant, dramatized department store window displays and eclectic couture.³⁸

Nosing around secondhand bookshops on Lower Broadway, Lévi-Strauss was moved to find issues of the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology on sale for a few dollars. “I could scarcely describe my emotion at this find,” he later remembered. “That these sacrosanct volumes, in their original green and gold bindings, representing most of what will remain known about the American Indian, could actually be bought and privately owned was something I had never dreamt of.”³⁹ He scrimped and saved, and gradually built up his collection—ranging from Mesoamerican pictographs to Pacific Northwest Coast Tsimshian mythology—ending up with every volume except one.

Lévi-Strauss toured the museums. What they lacked in range and depth, they made up for in solidity and attention to detail. He became fascinated by the hyperrealist dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, with their too-perfect arrangements of stuffed animals and plants from around the world, re-created, like a freeze-frame of a zoo exhibit, down to their last leaf and whisker. The ground floor of the museum, curated at the turn of the century by the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, was given over to the Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast—a string of indigenous settlements stretching from Alaska through British Columbia down as far as Oregon, which had produced some of the finest pre-Columbian art in the Americas. The museum’s broad corridors housed rows of heavy totem poles, obsidian masks and wooden chests carved with a mix of formal and figurative designs. Lévi-Strauss spent hours wandering through these galleries, looking at each artifact in detail.

One object, a sxwaixwe mask from the Salish people around Vancouver, particularly disturbed him. With its plug-shaped eyes—two cylinders projecting out from the face as if the eyeballs were mounted on stalks—and its gaping mouth, the mask was an exceptional piece. “It looked so different from the rest,” Lévi-Strauss remembered thirty years later. “Not the same shape, not the same style, and especially these protruding eyes—and my problem was, why these protruding eyes? What is their meaning? What are they there for?”⁴⁰ These were questions that he would be able to answer only toward the end of his career, with the help of the theoretical tools he would develop in the interim, when he returned to the subject in the 1970s in La Voie des masques (The Way of the Masks). In the intervening period he developed what he described as a “carnal bond” with Pacific Northwest art, which intrigued him as much aesthetically as intellectually.⁴¹

WHILE VISITING SURREALIST PAINTER Yves Tanguy, Lévi-Strauss found a small studio in Greenwich Village near the corner of Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue, which he immediately rented. Down a dingy basement corridor and up a staircase, the studio gave onto an overgrown garden. The accommodation was basic—a single room with a bed, a table and two chairs, with a sitting room annex. For decorations, Lévi-Strauss painted his own artwork, “a large surrealist-inspired canvas in somber tones, with giant interlocking hands dissolving into other features.” It was a reworking of the manic sketch he had produced in the Amazon after the herder Emídio had blown his hand apart.⁴² On the coffee table there was a glass ashtray along with a small wooden statue of a golden-eyed warrior and a miniature British-Columbian totem.⁴³ The desk on which he wrote much of his five-hundred-page thesis was barely a meter wide.⁴⁴ Unbeknownst to Lévi-Strauss, Claude Shannon, the father of cybernetics, was renting an apartment on the same block, “inventing an artificial brain,” according to one of Lévi-Strauss’s neighbors.⁴⁵ Over the next years, the two men—one working on computer circuit boards and the other on tribal kin relations—would labor away on the same fundamental problems completely unaware of each other’s existence.

As the artistic hub of New York—a network of cold-water flats, poky studios and crumbling tenement apartments—Greenwich Village was quickly colonized by the surrealist émigrés. Yves Tanguy joined Breton on Eleventh Street and Roberto Matta on Ninth. After a spell uptown in Peggy Guggenheim’s Hale House, Marcel Duchamp had eventually settled nearby in his famously minimalist one-room studio, decked out with a table, a chair, a packing case and two nails hammered into the wall with a piece of string hanging off one of them. American artists were also moving into the neighborhood. A few blocks away was the young and then relatively unknown Jackson Pollock, along with Gordon Onslow Ford, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell.⁴⁶ Life in the village was convivial. Italian delicatessens sold homemade spaghetti, traders laid out fruit and vegetables on carts, and the clubs along MacDougal Street played gravelly, slow-tempo jazz into the night. Nevertheless, the French complained bitterly about the lack of cafés, which had formed the backbone of their bohemian lifestyle in Paris. Lévi-Strauss’s own nostalgia was different. Although French to his core, his long spell in South America had left him rootless. “I dreamt a lot about the map of France,” he later recalled, “a France I hardly knew.”⁴⁷

Through Breton, Lévi-Strauss soon became an honorary member of a celebrated artistic set. He was invited to soirées where the surrealists played their infamous parlor games: vérité, a psychoanalytic version of “truth or dare”; charades using only analogies; tarot card readings; and cadavres exquis (exquisite corpses), a game in which textual and visual fragments produced by members of the group were agglomerated into bizarre images and narratives. The artists visited one another’s houses, dined out, went to cocktail parties hosted by Peggy Guggenheim and late-night dancing sessions at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.

Lévi-Strauss warmed to Max Ernst from the outset, and became friends with André Masson. He admired Tanguy the painter, but found him difficult to get along with. Duchamp “had great kindness,” and Lévi-Strauss’s friendship with the poet and art critic Patrick Waldberg—who would later become one of surrealism’s chroniclers—outlasted the brief bohemian sojourn in wartime New York.⁴⁸ Waldberg remembers touring the exotic restaurants of Manhattan Island with Lévi-Strauss, sampling Panamanian tortoise eggs, moose stew, oyster soup, Mexican oil-palm grubs and “silky textured octopus.”⁴⁹ It is through Waldberg’s eyes that we see Lévi-Strauss at this crucial stage of his life—an exile, a thinker still on the periphery, but on the brink of greatness:

He appeared to me imbued with what I would call an air of dignity: tall and slender with a long chiseled face, a look at once profound and searching, sometimes dreaming and melancholic, sometimes fixed and alert . . . For those who didn’t know him well, his manner could be difficult and at times even cold . . . I also remember the weight of his silence, as soon as an unwelcome presence tried to get him to say something he didn’t want to say. But if he was with trusted friends, he knew how to turn on the charm with warm, sometimes passionate, words.⁵⁰

Lévi-Strauss’s association with the surrealists was a fertile coming together of ideas. He was interested in midcentury artistic preoccupations: the subversive power of the subconscious, the importance of myth, irrationality and juxtaposition. The surrealists saw anthropology and psychology as the key modernist disciplines. They fed off half-digested ethnography and idolized tribal art. Just before the outbreak of the war, the artist Kurt Seligmann had spent almost four months at a trading station in British Columbia observing the ritual life and artwork of the Northwest Coast Indians, shipping an eighteen-meter-high totem pole back to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Breton was a keen collector of indigenous artifacts, which had lined his studio in Paris. And while driving back across America from Santa Monica in Peggy Guggenheim’s Buick convertible, Max Ernst stopped off to witness Hopi dances and collect Zuni kachinas (figurines) carved from cottonwood root.

In New York, Ernst chanced upon even richer pickings. He was walking past a shop on Third Avenue, run by a German antiques dealer named Julius Carlebach, when a spoon caught the corner of his eye. It was of Northwest Coast indigenous provenance and was being displayed as a part of a collection of spoons from around the world. Ernst spoke to the dealer, who told him he would put together a collection of Northwest Coast tribal artifacts, which Ernst subsequently snapped up. At first he kept the shop’s location hidden from his fellow artists, turning down Seligmann’s offer to reveal the source in exchange for his collection of witchcraft illustrations, but eventually Breton tracked the shop down.

Soon Lévi-Strauss, along with all the surrealists, were descending on Carlebach’s store, pooling their money to buy up the Teotihuacán stone masks, Northwest Coast wood carvings, and Inuit and Melanesian art. Carlebach was a man of simple tastes, only interested in “old German chinaware and quaint curios of the Gemütlich type,” but, guided by the surrealists, he bought up wooden carved masks, bowls and clubs with built-in visual puns. His source was the Museum of the American Indian’s warehouse in the Bronx, which was filled with so-called duplicates that the director was selling off for fifty dollars apiece. One afternoon two taxis full of surrealist artists—among them Ernst, Breton, Matta, Tanguy and Seligmann, along with Lévi-Strauss and Georges Duthuit, the art critic and son-in-law of Matisse—set out for the Bronx warehouse. With the help of a guard, they toured the museum’s stores, selecting choice artifacts, which would then mysteriously end up for sale in Carlebach’s shop.⁵¹

For the collector, New York at midcentury was a treasure trove. A spectacular range of global flotsam had washed up in what had already become one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. With the right connections, there were trunks of Peruvian antiques, shelves piled high with Nazca vases, boxes of jewelry salvaged from the Russian Revolution or packing cases of rare Utamaro Japanese prints on offer, sold informally from apartments, garages and sheds in the backstreets of midtown Manhattan. The secondhand shops were piled high with sixteenth-century Spanish and Italian furniture. Though relatively poor at the time, Lévi-Strauss found he could afford an antique Tuscan sideboard, on sale for just a couple of dollars. After the war he had it shipped back to Europe, where it furnished his apartment in Paris.⁵²

IN 1942 AMERICAN SURREALIST artist David Hare, working with Breton and Ernst, launched the journal VVV, a Documents-like combination of poetry, art, anthropology, sociology and psychology. Their stated aim was “to distinguish what is dead from what is living in all fields relevant to art and action,” an enterprise requiring “the very different skills of coroner and midwife.”⁵³ The first issue is like a time capsule representing the artistic tics and obsessions of an era, containing pieces on mythology, childhood, dream imagery and discussions about the possibilities of purity through spontaneity. Incongruously wedged between poetry by Aimé Césaire and a collection of surreal images—a clock in fragments, an umbrella on a staircase, bathtubs in a field, a New England church with pews outside—was a piece by Lévi-Strauss.

It was titled “Indian Cosmetics” and returned to the mysterious volutes and coils—the “expert bruisings” and “graphic surgery,” as he put it—that he had photographed on the faces of the Caduveo women in backland Mato Grosso years before. By now, his analysis was beginning to focus on formal, aesthetic aspects:

These highly developed compositions, at once unsymmetrical and balanced, are begun in one corner or other, and carried out without hesitation, going over, or erasure, to their conclusion. They evidently spring from an unvarying fundamental theme, in which crosses, tendrils, fret-work and spirals play an important part. Nevertheless, each one constitutes an original work: the basic motifs are combined with an ingenuity, a richness of imagination, even an audacity, which continually spring afresh.⁵⁴

Also in the issue was Lévi-Strauss’s appreciation of Bronislaw Malinowski, the recently deceased father of modern fieldwork. He heaped praise on Malinowski’s contribution to anthropology, both in terms of his pathbreaking ethnographic work and his twinning of “the two most revolutionary disciplines of our time: ethnology and psychoanalysis.” From now on, wrote Lévi-Strauss, all ethnography would be viewed as “pre- or post-Malinowski.” But the review had a sting in the tail, and a highly ironic one, given Lévi-Strauss’s future orientation. He criticized Malinowski’s “inexplicable disdain for history” and “absolute contempt for material culture.”⁵⁵ Lévi-Strauss would always be interested in material culture, but would go on to reject outright historical approaches to ethnography.

THROUGH THE SUMMER MONTHS Lévi-Strauss tried to pick up the thread of his academic career. He finally began writing up his fieldwork notes, working them into a publishable thesis. He decided to write in English, to master a language in which he still felt clumsy. In the meantime he made contact with the leading lights of anthropology in the United States. He got in contact with Alfred Métraux, who was teaching at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. The two became close friends. Métraux would stay in the Greenwich Village studio when he was visiting New York, with Lévi-Strauss sleeping on a camp bed in the sitting room. At the time Métraux was organizing the Handbook of South American Indians, an encyclopedic overview of the region’s ethnography, and he invited Lévi-Strauss to contribute sections on the indigenous groups of central Brazil. Robert Lowie, who had supported his application to the New School, and Alfred Kroeber were teaching in California but made contact on visits to New York. Lévi-Strauss met anthropologists Ralph Linton and Ruth Benedict and got a taste of the departmental politics at Columbia University. Linton and Benedict’s mutual loathing was legendary, and they would invite Lévi-Strauss to dinner to bitch about each other.

But, most important, he had the opportunity to meet Franz Boas, then in the last years of his life. Boas had begun fieldwork among the Inuit on Baffin Island in the 1880s, before working with Pacific Northwest groups, including the Kwakiutl (now known as the Kwakwaka’wakw). He became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia—a post he held for thirty-seven years. A small-framed, intense figure with his bushy mustache, goatee beard and swept-back gray hair, Boas was the first to back up a professional interest in Native American culture with detailed fieldwork research into language, physical anthropology and material culture. His students, among them Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie and Edward Sapir, defined the first wave of institutionalized anthropology in America. “All of American anthropology issued from him,” Lévi-Strauss later said, without exaggeration.⁵⁶

Lévi-Strauss wrote to Boas as soon as he arrived in New York. Boas received him cordially, as the young, unknown, virtually unpublished French anthropologist he then was. Lévi-Strauss subsequently went to Boas’s house in Grantwood across the Hudson, where he admired Boas’s collections of Kwakiutl wood carvings. Boas liked to tell the story of when he brought a Kwakiutl informant to New York for the first time. The Native American seemed unimpressed by the heaving avenues, rows of skyscrapers, subways and the steam rising through pavement vents. What caught his attention were the freak shows that still ran on Times Square, with their dwarves and bearded ladies. He also developed specific aesthetic interests—becoming fixated on the brass balls on staircase banisters and on tumble clothes dryers in Laundromats—just as the anthropologist was wont to fetishize certain aspects of the indigenous cultures he visited.⁵⁷

Much later, at the end of 1942, Lévi-Strauss and Boas met on one final occasion at a lunch that has gone down in the annals of anthropology. The lunch was organized in honor of another French exile, Dr. Rivet of the Musée de l’Homme, with guests including Boas’s protégés Mead, Benedict and Linton. Rivet had been working in South America in Colombia and was passing through New York en route to Mexico. On a bitter winter’s day they settled around a large dining table at the university faculty club. “Boas was very jovial,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “In the middle of a conversation, he shoved himself violently away from the table and fell backwards. I was seated next to him and bent down to lift him up. Rivet, who had started his career as a military doctor, tried in vain to revive him. Boas was dead.”⁵⁸

LÉVI-STRAUSS BEGAN WORK in the autumn at the New School for Social Research, his name chopped down to Claude L. Strauss, to distinguish himself from the jeans. “The students would find it funny,” he was told by way of explanation. The confusion would plague him throughout his life. “Hardly a year goes by without my receiving, usually from Africa, an order for a pair of jeans,” he told Didier Eribon in the 1980s—though, with fame, Lévi-Strauss found he could almost hold his own. When he gave his name while queuing for a restaurant in San Francisco in the 1980s, the waiter shot back, “The pants or the books?”⁵⁹

The New School brought together émigrés from around Europe, great minds working in a looser, cross-disciplinary milieu. It was a vibrant environment, in which new music, theater and film mixed freely with academia. Lévi-Strauss gave lectures on the contemporary sociology of South America, a subject in which he had little grounding, beyond his experiences in Brazil. He had boned up on the topic over the summer and managed to pull together a series of evening classes, skipping from Argentina to Peru to Bolivia. He still struggled with the language, but since most of the students were also foreign refugees, broken English became the lingua franca.

In early 1942 the École libre des hautes études de New York—a kind of French university-in-exile—was inaugurated next door to the New School. Backed by De Gaulle’s Free French, as well as the Belgian government-in-exile, the university opened to great fanfare at the Assembly Hall of Hunter College with three thousand in attendance and Metropolitan Opera singers on hand to sing the American, Belgian and French national anthems. The New York Times compared the École’s role to Constantinople’s sheltering of scholars after the fall of Rome. The historical subtext was clear: in response to the boorish Nazi empire, French-speaking Jews—barred by racist laws from working in France, Belgium and Eastern Europe—were being welcomed in the New World. It became a major francophone institution in New York, with ninety professors teaching almost a thousand students in subjects ranging from cinematography to law.⁶⁰

Lévi-Strauss lectured in French on anthropology—a relief after cobbling together sociological talks in English. The topics were broad: General Ethnography, The First Totalitarian State: The Incas, The Study of Material Culture in the Museum and in the Field. Yet Lévi-Strauss often found himself lecturing in near-empty rooms. Not that it seemed to bother him—he spoke “as if he were in a vast auditorium,” according to Patrick Waldberg’s wife, Isabelle, who attended his course. She remembered Lévi-Strauss’s lecturing style as competent, but by no means electrifying: “One feels that Lévi-Strauss takes great trouble to work through the issue, and even if he doesn’t reach startlingly original conclusions, he at least offers plenty of detail, expresses himself with clarity and often makes very interesting comparisons.”⁶¹

Toward the end of the war Lévi-Strauss also taught at Barnard College, a women’s campus affiliated to Columbia University in Morningside Heights, his first, nerve-racking foray into the mainstream U.S. university system. Thirty years later, during a talk to the college’s alumnae, he could afford to joke about his disastrous debut:

When I settled myself behind the table and started lecturing on the Nambikwara Indians, my fright changed to panic: no student was taking notes; instead of writing, they were knitting. They went on knitting until the hour was over as if they were paying no attention to what I was saying—or rather trying to say in my clumsy English. They did listen, though, for after the class was over a girl (I can still see her: slender, graceful, with short and curly ash-blonde hair, and wearing a blue dress) came up to me and said that it was all very interesting but she thought I should know that desert and dessert are different words.

Whether or not, on some subconscious level, Lévi-Strauss was already drawing his ideas together, the raw materials of future analyses were gradually building up. In a faint echo of Karl Marx’s time in the Reading Room of the British Library a century before, each morning from nine till midday he would sit in the now defunct American room of the New York Public Library.⁶³ In contrast with the cavernous main reading hall, the American room was a smaller, more intimate setting for Lévi-Strauss’s research. A high portal with an austere marble architrave led into the room of a dozen reading desks, a counter behind which the librarian would sit and banks of card catalogs. Natural light streamed through the skylights, illuminating floor-to-ceiling book casing, with a mezzanine for access to the upper shelves.

It was there, in the classic beaux arts building on Fifth Avenue, with its murals, decorated ceilings, carved oak and tiled floors, that Lévi-Strauss hoovered up the vast store of ethnography that had accumulated in the library’s subterranean stacks. “What I know of anthropology I learnt in those years,” he later recalled.⁶⁴ On breaks he browsed scientific journals, trying to keep abreast of the latest developments in other fields. As he digested ethnography after ethnography, memorizing obscure native beliefs and practices, a Native American in full feather headdress and buckskin jacket sat a few tables along, jotting down notes with a Parker pen.⁶⁵

It was during this period that he came across another book that fit like a key into his evolving thought: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, an eccentric classic that looked at the mathematics of morphology. A Scottish polymath, D’Arcy Thompson showed how both natural and human engineering had arrived at similarly elegant geometric solutions to design challenges thrown up by physical conditions in the world. In a series of beautifully written illustrations of his ideas, D’Arcy Thompson compared the shape of a falling drop of water to a jellyfish, plant fiber to wire, the metacarpal bone from a vulture’s wing to a certain type of truss. Nature’s diversity was generated out of different applications of classical proportions and ratios, which had subsequently been rediscovered in the geometry and mathematics of Pythagoras and Newton. Although some have considered the book scientific heresy because it played down the role of Darwinian evolution, it continues to fascinate to this day.⁶⁶ For Lévi-Strauss, D’Arcy Thompson’s blend of aesthetics and theory was hugely appealing.

PRIMED WITH RAW MATERIAL, Lévi-Strauss was ripe for theory. He was in search of a framework, some organizing principle, the inner structure that he had sensed during his fieldwork in Brazil. He was looking for what had triggered the powerful sensations that he had felt while gazing into the bunch of dandelions on the Luxembourg border and while reading Granet’s kinship book. “At the time I was a kind of naïve structuralist,” he later explained, “a structuralist without knowing it.”⁶⁷

The catalyst was the Russian poet and linguist Roman Jakobson. He was fluent in a dozen languages and had been a key member of both the Moscow and Prague linguistic schools. The world Lévi-Strauss had recently been introduced to in New York had long been Jakobson’s natural milieu—a mix of academia and modern art, lecture halls and bohemia, avant-garde poetry and the then emerging field of structural linguistic analysis. In revolutionary Moscow, Jakobson had mixed with the futurists; in Prague, with Czech surrealists and modernist cabaret artists. He had even dabbled in anthropology, studying folklore in and around Moscow, alongside the Russian ethnologist Petr Bogatyrev.

A bon vivant, “a veritable globe-trotter of structuralism,”⁶⁸ Jakobson had arrived in New York after a tortuous flight across Central Europe and Scandinavia, never more than a few paces ahead of the galloping Nazi frontier. On the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Jakobson had been teaching at Masaryk University in Brno. Well known as a Jewish antifascist intellectual, he burned his papers and went into hiding. He wound up in Prague, spending a month living in a wardrobe at his father-in-law’s apartment. Accompanied by his wife, Svatava, Jakobson traveled on to Denmark, where he had been invited to teach at the University of Copenhagen. The journey took the couple through the Nazi heartlands, forcing them at one point to change trains in Berlin. There, Jakobson took perverse delight in drinking a beer on the platform while posting off letters to friends who were astonished to see a Berlin postmark days after Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations.

Jakobson worked at the University of Copenhagen for six months before being forced to flee with his wife to Norway. On the German invasion, they were on the run again, reaching the Swedish border without a passport or any identity papers. After a week imprisoned in a customs post, they were allowed into neutral Sweden to settle in Uppsala, where Jakobson researched aphasia and child speech patterns. A year later he was on a steamer bound for America, but his ordeal was not quite over. German soldiers boarded the ship en route to check the identity of the passengers. As Jakobson and his wife were stateless, they were in a potentially dangerous position, but they managed to convince the officers that they were Russian émigrés and were allowed to proceed to New York.⁶⁹

When Jakobson arrived in New York, Lévi-Strauss was still struggling with his thesis on the Nambikwara, trying to fit together scraps of kinship and linguistic data collected on his journey across Mato Grosso. In his field notes, he had experimented with a series of different models for describing kinship systems—the conventional family tree, columns of relationships headed “mon père appelle,” “ma mère appelle,” “mon frère appelle,” “j’appelle,” “mon mari appelle” and so on, as well as a checkerboard design that cross-referenced rows and columns of kin terms. He sometimes used stick figures (a stick penis added to distinguish between the sexes) with lines, circles and arrows connecting up relatives across generations.

There was an air of desperation in the successive tables of basic native vocabulary, listing kinship terminology in yet another language with which Lévi-Strauss would have had only fleeting contact. At one point he jotted down “langue semble différente” (language appears to be different), suggesting that he was having problems even identifying which linguistic group he was dealing with.⁷⁰ When he talked about his difficulties to Alexandre Koyré, a French-Russian academic specializing in the history and philosophy of science, Koyré suggested that he should see Jakobson, who had just begun lecturing at the École libre des hautes études. Koyré had sensed a possible affinity between the two, but he could not have imagined the impact his introduction would have. Lévi-Strauss was expecting technical advice; what he got was a whole new way of thinking.

Jakobson was twelve years older than Lévi-Strauss, and with his vast and varied academic experience in universities across Europe, he became a kind of mentor to the young anthropologist. At first Jakobson thought he had found an ideal drinking partner with whom he could talk into the night, but he soon discovered that Lévi-Strauss, despite cavorting with the surrealists, was a moderate at heart, who didn’t drink and preferred to get to bed early. Yet Jakobson’s hedonism somehow meshed with Lévi-Strauss’s more subdued asceticism and their friendship blossomed, developing into a lifelong attachment. They dined out frequently together, exploring New York’s Chinese, Greek and Armenian restaurants.⁷¹ Jakobson also introduced Lévi-Strauss to a new circle of intellectuals. Through Raymond de Saussure, the son of the great linguist, he made contact with New York’s leading psychoanalysts, including Rudolph Loewenstein, Ernst Kris and Herman Nunberg.

From the autumn of 1942, they attended each other’s courses—Jakobson’s on phonetics and Lévi-Strauss’s on kinship. Speaking virtually without notes in fluent French, Jakobson skipped from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe to Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, tossing in philosophers Edmund Husserl and Jeremy Bentham along with the Scholastics. He gave examples of liquids, labiodentals, nasals, hissing and hushing sibilants from the Slavic languages, illustrating his arguments with words drawn from French, Finnish and Korean. And amid this display of European cosmopolitanism and erudition, Jakobson told the story of the emergence of structural linguistics, an approach first outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure and then developed by the Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy and Jakobson himself. “The discipline practised by Jakobson enthralled me like a detective story,” remembered Lévi-Strauss. “I had the feeling I was taking part in a great adventure of the mind.”⁷²

At its core, structural linguistics worked with a simple yet revolutionary idea: the notion that language consisted of a formal system of interrelated elements, and that meaning resided not in the elements themselves, but in their relationships to one another. The solidity of language—of the word, its sound and referent—was dissolved. At root was a system of differences. The classic examples came from phonetics, a field that had forged ahead under the new approach. In the nineteenth century, linguists had focused on the production of sound and describing the sounds themselves. They studied the position of the tongue, the lips and teeth during a given utterance; they filmed, photographed and eventually were able to X-ray speakers’ larynxes; they monitored each subtle modulation, building up finer and finer-grained data, more and more complex notations of subtly different sounds. The end point was a virtual continuum of sound and motion—a jelly of data that offered no theoretical purchase. Under the strictly empiricist approach, “the phonic substance of language becomes as dust,” as Jakobson put it.⁷³

Jakobson likened the previous generation to a character in a story written by the romantic Russian writer Vladimir Odoevsky (and later reprised by Borges in the short story “Funes the Memorious”). A man is given the gift of being able to see and hear everything and promptly descends into a supersaturated, empiricist hell: “Everything in nature became fragmented before him, and nothing formed whole in his mind,” and for this unfortunate man “the sounds of speech became transformed into a torrent of innumerable articulatory motions of mechanical vibrations, aimless and without meaning.”⁷⁴

Structural phonology, Jakobson went on to explain, offered a way out of this exponential explosion of data. The key problem was to identify the “quanta of language”: the smallest units able to change meanings. Sounds with a “differentiating value” were called phonemes. Pairs of opposing phonemes—like b and v in “bat” and “vat”—operated like gates on a circuit board, switching between alternate meanings. Crucially, it was the relationship between the phonemes that generated meaning, not the phonemes themselves; thus the paradox: “Language . . . is composed of elements which are signifiers, yet at the same time signify nothing.”⁷⁵ Jakobson went on to demonstrate the progress over the past decade, and the systematization of the phonemes into bundles of features, which could be paired off into basic oppositions—compact and diffuse, open and closed, acute and grave—which underlay all languages. He would later elaborate these relations in an ingeniously simple schema: two triangles, one for vowels and the other for consonants, which distilled fundamental phonetic differences. As newborns gradually tuned in to these distinctions, they began standardizing their multiple combinations into meaningful sounds, the words of their native language, be it French, Japanese or Turkish.

For Lévi-Strauss, the idea that thousands of languages were rooted in an essence—small sets of opposed phonemes—was seductively reductionist. Like the nineteenth-century linguists, Lévi-Strauss had also felt overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of empirical data, condemned “to the endless task of searching for things behind things.”⁷⁶ The change in focus from objects to the relationships between objects seemed potentially liberating. Structural linguistics had shown that a deliberate foray into abstraction and experimentation with higher-order modeling could yield dramatic results.

As Lévi-Strauss continued his course on kinship, the fit seemed uncanny. Kinship was, after all, a relational system par excellence. Kin diagrams naturally lent themselves to simple oppositions: male/female; in marriage/out marriage; opposing moieties, clans and grades. Running underneath the drama of human relations were unspoken rules, unconsciously observed, which allowed groups of people to communicate with almost mathematical efficiency down the generations. Although the array of bizarre marriage rules seemed baffling in isolation, taken as a set—as contrasting strategies within an overall system—Lévi-Strauss could begin to see the outlines of a grand scheme. Jakobson encouraged him to write down his ideas, and while Lévi-Strauss finished off his thesis on the Nambikwara, he also began work on Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship).

The different strands of Lévi-Strauss’s thought were coming together. The new linguistics drew a common thread through his early intellectual history—his fascination for Marx and Freud, as well as his interest in geology. He realized that ethnographic reports that he had been reading, as vivid as they appeared, were mere surface phenomena—as landscape is to geology, historical events are to the Marxist, or desire, revulsion and neurosis to the psychoanalyst.

To these three “mistresses,” he could now add another: the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Through Jakobson’s influence, Saussure’s famous Cours de linguistique générale, which had been compiled by students and posthumously published in 1915, became a cornerstone of his thinking. Key ideas from the Cours became permanent features of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual arsenal: the distinction between la langue (language as an abstract system) and la parole (language as it is spoken) and the differences between the synchronic (snapshot) and diachronic (historical) approaches were transposed into the ethnographic setting. Henceforth, Lévi-Strauss would focus his attention on comparisons between abstract cultural systems drawn from the ethnographic record rather than individual ethnographies, just as linguists privileged grammars over the background noise of idiosyncratic usage and gradual linguistic drift. Saussure’s concept of “binary pairs”—the contrasts that generate meaning—that had been so useful in phonetics became another Lévi-Straussian staple.

Saussure’s insights, filtered through Jakobsonian structural linguistics, gave Lévi-Strauss the tools with which to float free from the morass of descriptive data and observe the patterns that cut across continents and cultures. The exercise required a massive leap of faith. As Lévi-Strauss began importing wholesale concepts from linguistics into the social sciences, he was setting off on a path into the intellectual unknown.