Claude Levi-Strauss

LÉVI-STRAUSS WAS AS FASCINATED by the work of Sigmund Freud as he was skeptical of the practice of psychoanalysis—then becoming an established, if left-field, treatment for psychosexual problems and neuroses. In New York, he had met the famous Freudian psychoanalyst Raymond de Saussure through Jakobson, and back in Paris his friendship with Jacques Lacan was blossoming. In the 1960s he would make the distinction between the psychoanalyst’s “theory of the mind” and “theory of the cure,” saying that it was only the former that interested him.² But in the late 1940s he began exploring the borderlands between psychoanalysis and anthropology, the therapist and the shaman, analysis and ritual cure. It offered him a way back to the matrix of the unconscious, the irrational and the primitive—the aesthetic hunting ground of the surrealists. It also opened up another area that was occupying his thoughts more and more: myth.

He set down his ideas while teaching at the newly established Sixth Section of the École pratique des hautes études—an autonomous social science research center, the institutional home of the famous Annales school of historical research. He had been recruited by founder of the Sixth Section Lucien Febvre in the winter of 1948-49, the first fully functioning year of the institution, to give a seminar on the Religious Life of Primitives. In two essays—“The Sorcerer and His Magic” and “The Effectiveness of Symbols”—he placed ethnographic examples from Brazil, Panama, Mexico and the Pacific Northwest against Freudian psychoanalysis.

“The Sorcerer and His Magic” followed the story of Quesalid, one of Franz Boas’s informants from the Kwakiutl group near Vancouver. Quesalid is a native skeptic who becomes a shaman in order to unmask “the false supernatural,” the fakery of the shaman’s art—the hidden nails, the tufts of down concealed in the corner of the mouth, the use of “dreamers” (spies) to find out information about the patient who is being treated. But through the course of his debunking quest, as Quesalid himself becomes a great shaman renowned for his cures, he begins to doubt his own skepticism. He finds that some deceptions work better than others, that certain rituals do in fact make patients better. Through his cures Quesalid discovers that the power of performance is in some sense real. The interactions between the patient, the shaman and the group, the structuring of a psychic universe, however achieved, bring about concrete results.³

This point was vividly demonstrated in Lévi-Strauss’s companion piece, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” written at around the same time. Dedicated to Raymond de Saussure, the essay worked through a ritual incantation used to assist difficult childbirths in Panama, which had been recorded by Swedish ethnologists. The incantation describes the shaman’s and his spirit assistants’ journey into the woman’s vagina and up to the uterus on a quest to release the unborn child. The child must be liberated from the Muu—the spirit who forms the fetus, but who in this case has abused her powers. The shaman sings the woman’s predicament as she lies in a hammock, knees parted, pointing eastward, “groaning, losing blood, the vulva dilating and moving.” He calls on diverse spirits, “of the winds, waters and woods,” as well as, in a Conradesque touch, “the spirit of the silver steamer of the white man.”

As the torturous labor continues, the shaman embarks on his journey. Through blood and tissue, into a uterine “hell à la Hieronymous Bosch,” he marshals his spirits in single file along “Muu’s way.” The group struggles up the woman’s birth canal, the shaman calling on “Lords of the wood-boring insects” to cut through the sinews, clearing a path through a jungle of human fiber. After defeating Muu and her daughters with the use of magic hats, and thus releasing the child, the shaman’s troop begins the descent, another perilous journey, analogous to the act of childbirth itself. The shaman urges his troop on toward the orifice, employing more “clearers of the way,” such as the armadillo. After the delivery of the child, the shaman throws up a cloud of dust, obscuring the path to prevent Muu’s escape.⁴

The myth, rich in literary effect, worked by focusing the woman’s mind and body, by organizing—structuring—the otherwise chaotic experience of an interminable labor. Lévi-Strauss likened the process to the psychoanalyst’s “abreaction,” whereby the patient, guided by the analyst, relives painful past experience in order to unblock subconscious impasses. Based on the same elements, the shamanistic cure was actually a tidy inversion of psychoanalysis: while the analyst listens, the shaman speaks. Guided by the analyst, the patient elaborates his own personal myth, normally a stylized version of vague childhood memories. The shaman, on the other hand, declaims an equally formulaic social myth. With transference, the patient articulates through the analyst, while the shaman speaks on behalf of the patient. But both approaches were ultimately premised on the assumption that the unconscious—that apparently mysterious, subterranean place of inchoate feelings, the bizarre and the unexpected—was in fact a logically structured universe. Both shamanism and psychoanalysis worked by eliciting this symbolic structure, evoking the hidden order of experience.

Lévi-Strauss’s point was that modern techniques were merely reworkings of ideas that have been with us from the dawn of time. When Europe was still chaining up the mad, shamans in “primitive” societies were already treating patients on the metaphorical psychoanalyst’s couch.⁵ (Much later, he would argue in La Potière jalouse that many of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, such as the oral or anal character, effectively recycled indigenous Jivaro myths.) In fact, it was only in the then most experimental branch of psychoanalysis, namely group therapy, that modern practitioners were beginning to approach the most sophisticated techniques that had been known to shamans for millennia.

Lévi-Strauss’s concluding remarks moved from psychoanalysis to the unconscious to myth, making perhaps his strongest appeal yet to the kind of structuralism of symbolic and mythic thought that would end up dominating the rest of his career. Memories, strange incidents, and personal histories related to the unconscious like words to a language, where “the vocabulary matters less than the structure.” Myths, whether embodied in individual neurotic complexes or social narratives, were stocks of unconscious representations, structured by a limited set of laws. He ended by drawing a direct parallel between language and myth, already hinting at a project that would culminate in the Mythologiques quartet:

There are many languages, but very few structural laws which are valid for all languages. A compilation of known tales and myths would fill an imposing number of volumes. But they can be reduced to a small number of simple types if we abstract from, among the diversity of characters, a few elementary functions. As for the complexes—those individual myths—they also correspond to a few simple types, which mold the fluid multiplicity of cases.⁶

Lévi-Strauss’s brief foray into the world of psychoanalysis left an indelible mark on the future of the profession. The essays deeply influenced Jacques Lacan, who cited them in his early theoretical breakthrough lecture delivered in Zurich, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” as well as in his 1953 Rome discourse, a polemic calling for a return to the analysis of the patient’s language. Lacan’s intervention signaled a break from the psychoanalytic establishment and the opening up of a new form of practice—as abstruse as it was influential—that spread through the humanities in the 1960s and ’70s.

MANY HAVE NOTED the extraordinary unity of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual output. These early essays, packed with hints of the future direction of his work, are a testament to his steady progression and the internal consistency of his ideas. By the end of the 1940s, he had eased into position the foundation stones on which he would construct his life’s work; many of the theoretical set pieces that would crop up again and again in books, interviews and articles were already in place. For Lévi-Strauss, language, as a formal system of differences, had become more than just an analogy. It was a template that could draw out new truths from diverse domains: kinship, the unconscious, symbolic thought, myth and aesthetic composition.

Lévi-Strauss’s remarkably coherent theoretical outlook was twinned with the conviction that the whole of the humanities, following the lead of linguistics, was on the brink of a scientific revolution, destined to move in his direction. He even read back into previous key works the beginnings of a struggle toward structuralist thought. When, in 1950, Lévi-Strauss was asked by the sociologist Georges Gurvitch to write an introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss as part of a series of books on recently deceased intellectual greats (Mauss had died three years earlier, at the age of seventy-seven, after a bout of bronchitis), Lévi-Strauss tried to portray him as a proto-structuralist. In this rewriting of French intellectual history, the Essai sur le don (The Gift) was the breakthrough—a work in which anthropology finally moved beyond mere observation and crude comparisons to look at its subject matter as a system, alive with correlations, formal equivalences and interdependent parts, and reducible to a limited set of operations. “The Essai sur le don therefore inaugurates a new era for the social sciences, just as phonology did for linguistics,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, and “can be compared to the discovery of combinatorial analysis for modern mathematical thinking.” Mauss had provided the inspiration, but had not been able to follow through. “Like Moses conducting his people to the promised land whose splendour he would never behold,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, Mauss had halted “at the edge of . . . immense possibilities.”⁷

Gurvitch was unhappy with this interpretation, which did indeed seem to willfully manipulate the legacy of France’s most celebrated anthropologist. Claude Lefort cut to the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s sleight of hand in Les Temps modernes, in the same review in which he had taken on Les Structures élémentaires. For Lefort, Lévi-Strauss’s reading “seems foreign to his inspiration: Mauss aim[ed] at meaning, not at symbols,” wanted to understand “behavior without leaving the realm of experience” and was never trying to construct a Lévi-Strauss-type superstructure of logic.⁸

ON THE STRENGTH of Les Structures élémentaires and a now respectable body of published articles, Lévi-Strauss’s reputation was growing, and moves were already afoot to have him admitted to the prestigious Collège de France. Founded in the sixteenth century by Francis I for the king’s lecturers, the Collège de France remains an elite institution, the pinnacle of French intellectual life. Part of its attraction is that it functions at a remove from the university system. It does not award degrees or administer exams, nor is there a syllabus or student body. The day-today bureaucracy of university life is eliminated in favor of pure, original research, presented in a series of twelve two-hour lectures, open to the public. Membership is for life, voted by existing members. In the secure but open-ended environment of the Collège, with its mission “to teach science in the making,”⁹ academics either flatlined or innovated. Lévi-Strauss, who was already furrowing his own idiosyncratic intellectual path, would surely thrive.

At the time, admission to this elite intellectual sect still seemed a surreal prospect for Lévi-Strauss. “I hardly knew what the Collège de France was,” he recalled, remembering it from his youth as “a fearsome place, off limits,” which he had avoided even setting foot in as a student.¹⁰ But unbeknownst to him, even before he arrived back in Paris, his supporters had begun mobilizing on his behalf. As he was leaving New York, Gaston Berger had made the throwaway remark that Lévi-Strauss was returning to France to enter the Collège. At the time, Lévi-Strauss had dismissed it as banter, but when he arrived back in Paris, the psychologist Henri Piéron called him for a meeting and told him that he had supporters in the Collège who wanted to see him elected. Lévi-Strauss was seen as a modernizing force, both in terms of his theories and his progressive politics—progressive, that is, in comparison with the sclerotically conservative hierarchy that still dominated the institution. The old guard was epitomized by Edmond Faral, who had held the chair in Latin Literature of the Middle Ages since 1924 and was then the Collège’s administrator.

When a chair became vacant, Piéron put Lévi-Strauss forward for election, in November 1949, but he was defeated. One year later another chair at the Collège came up. The linguist Émile Benveniste nominated Lévi-Strauss once more, but again he was turned down. By coincidence, Lévi-Strauss was giving the Fondation Loubat lecture series at the Collège as his application was being considered for the second time, delivering six talks on the Mythic Expression of Social Structure. In the audience were Max Ernst, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Dumézil. It was during these talks that Lévi-Strauss cemented his friendship with Dumézil—a key influence and ally in the years to come.

“Not naming any names,” Lévi-Strauss told me, “there was an element of anti-Semitism in my failure.” Faral, who during the occupation had barred Jews from the Collège even before the October 1940 law had required him to do so,¹¹ apparently told Lévi-Strauss to his face that he would never enter the Collège. More generally, Lévi-Strauss had been caught up in a struggle between conservatives and progressives. “I had been an innocent,” he told Didier Eribon, “brought in to a quarrel between ancients and moderns: the traditionalists still included men who, by their spirit or arrogance, belonged to another century.”

The double blow at the Collège was compounded by the separation from his second wife, Rose-Marie, a marriage that had lasted only a few years. “I broke with my past, rebuilt my private life” is as forthcoming as Lévi-Strauss ever was on the subject.¹² Short of money, he moved into the then working-class eleventh arrondissement—one of his rare spells outside the sixteenth. He was also forced to sell part of his treasured collection of indigenous artifacts—the masks and bowls for which he had scrimped and saved in New York. Half went to his friend Jacques Lacan, with other objects being sold to André Malraux, the Musée de l’Homme and a museum in the Dutch university town of Leiden.

BETWEEN THE TWO REJECTIONS from the Collège, Lévi-Strauss traveled to the subcontinent. He had secured funding through Métraux, who was then working for UNESCO’s Bureau for Racial Relations, for a two-month mission to Pakistan and India studying the possibilities for future research in the region, for UNESCO’s social sciences division. Lévi-Strauss traveled in the aftermath of one of the most cataclysmic partitions in history—Britain’s rapidly concocted division between India and Pakistan, which had erupted in bloodletting and left millions destitute in refugee camps, scattered on both sides of the borders. He visited Karachi, Dacca, the Chittagong Hills, Calcutta, New Delhi, Lahore and Peshawar, later condensing the six hundred pages of notes he took into two sections in Tristes Tropiques.

He flew to Karachi via Egypt, over the pale pinks—“peach bloom, mother of pearl, the iridescence of raw fish”—of the desert sands before rolling mists dissolved into the night.¹³ A dawn flight took him across the newly created partition, floating over a patchwork of pink and green agricultural fields, akin to “the geographical musings of Paul Klee.” Down to the mouths of the Ganges globular fields clustered together, surrounded by the viscous waters of the floodplains and the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans.¹⁴

In Calcutta he found himself mobbed by stump-waving beggars, rickshaw touts, shoeblacks, pimps and porters, while in the Chittagong Hills, where he stayed in a luxurious room in a Swiss-style chalet called the Circuit House, he was smothered by the attentions of teams of manservants. They preempted his every whim, serving five meals a day, continually offering to bathe him, even waiting outside the privy “to snatch the master’s substance from him.” He was repelled by their unctuousness—“There is something sexual in this anguished submission,” he observed—imprisoned in a colonial bubble that had survived independence intact.¹⁵

Traveling into the tribal areas north of Chittagong, Lévi-Strauss engaged in another short spell of on-the-hoof ethnography among the Kuki. He stayed in a bamboo house perched on a hillside, with ample verandas where women pounded paddy in a giant mortar with two-meter-high pestles. Deer, monkey, boar and panther skulls were used as decorations. On the evening of his arrival, the festivities began. They were served rice beer in oxen horns and treated to “extremely monotonous” dance songs, which Lévi-Strauss later transcribed. The boys wore loincloths, sashes and glass bead necklaces; the girls, knee-length skirts loaded with copper tubes, beetle-wing-fringed breastplates and ivory earplugs.

Lévi-Strauss’s experiences generated two almost apologetic papers, which remain elegies to his earlier forays into ethnography in Brazil. The first outlined a set of kinship terms for the Cakma, Kuki and Mog tribes, a list that remained incomplete “on account of the briefness of our stay in the native villages”; the second consisted of “highly fragmentary” descriptions of the Kuki village.¹⁶ Interestingly, the Kuki had already featured in Les Structures élémentaires as one of the key examples of a simple form of “generalized exchange.”¹⁷

Lévi-Strauss’s impressions of the subcontinent were bleak. In some of his most misanthropic writing, he recalled teeming cities, festering slums and dull, functional apartment blocks, like the half-built concrete cube he had driven past in the abandoned city in Brazil’s interior. All that he saw around him was “filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humours, secretions and running sores.”¹⁸ In a disturbing image, he likened the city slums to goose pens for producing foie gras, which he had seen in Mont-de-Marsan during his first year teaching at the Lycée Victor-Duruy. Each goose was wedged in a box, “reduced to the status of a mere feeding tube.” But there was an important difference—while the geese were being fattened up, the poor were being slimmed down. Like some sinister structuralist model, their tiny cubicles were “mere points of connection with the communal sewer,” reducing human life “to the pure exercise of excretory functions.”¹⁹

Was it temperament, culture shock or the difficult phase of his life—the disappointment at the Collège and his unraveling marriage—that produced such a toxic response to his experiences on the subcontinent? Whatever his reasons, the trip confirmed his growing disillusionment with modernity. Overpopulation would become thematic in Lévi-Strauss’s evolving critique. Man had once been in proportion to the natural landscapes he inhabited, roaming through vast forests, settling along thousand-kilometer littorals and roaring rivers. He was now reduced to “life on a pocket handkerchief scale,” in the drab uniformity of the world’s rapidly expanding cities.²⁰

BLOCKED FROM ASCENT in France’s hierarchical academic system, Lévi-Strauss felt himself adrift. He said that at this point he was convinced he would not have a “real career,” that he even entertained doubts about continuing to pursue anthropology, thinking again about journalism or writing.²¹ This seems difficult to square with his growing reputation in France and abroad. Even though he had failed entrance to the Collège, his career was progressing. At the end of 1950, on the heels of his second rejection at the Collège, he was appointed director of studies of the more conservative Fifth Section of the École pratique des hautes études, devoted to sciences religieuses (religious studies). He filled the chair left vacant by the retiring Maurice Leenhardt, the same chair that had been held by the great Marcel Mauss from the turn of the twentieth century up until the Second World War. It was another hard-fought appointment process. Leenhardt, a missionary-turned-anthropologist who had studied the Kanak people in New Caledonia, opposed Lévi-Strauss’s selection, favoring one of his student protégés to succeed him. But with the help of Georges Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss finally secured tenure. There he would become part of an illustrious intellectual heritage, which included several figures who influenced the formation of his own thought—Mauss, Dumézil as well as Marcel Granet and Alexandre Kojève.

The chair signaled a major change of direction for Lévi-Strauss, which in retrospect would split his career into two distinct phases. Perhaps fortunately, the post steered him away from the shoals of kinship and into the open waters of religious thought, an area that was looser, more to do with ideas, not so bound to the specifics of field data. Although Lévi-Strauss would continue to come back to kinship periodically, and still harbored a desire to write the Structures complexes companion piece to his thesis, future work would increasingly develop a more interpretive flavor. When I asked him why, after years dedicated to decoding kinship systems, he had lit out into new intellectual territory, he replied in a typically fatalistic fashion. There had been no real choice involved, as the shift in direction was imposed upon him. He had to fulfill his duties in a chair that was devoted to religious studies, he explained, as if he were merely a drone in the academic hive. But in retrospect the pull on the tiller seems rooted in Lévi-Strauss’s own evolving sense of where he wanted to end up. A trail of earlier articles on shamanism, myth and symbolism, written in the late 1940s while he was giving his Religious Life of Primitives seminars at the Sixth Section, had already signaled intent. By the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss was angling toward more interpretive areas of investigation, better suited to his aesthetic, literary frame of mind.

His decade of Wednesday afternoon lectures and seminars at the Fifth Section was a crucial road test for this new line of thinking. Following the method he had adopted in New York, he used his lecture cycle as an opportunity to think aloud, toy with new ideas, giving verbal expositions of what would later turn into essays and books. He worked from a rough outline but would go off on tangents when the mood took him, following chains of associations across the globe, bringing his now considerable ethnographic knowledge to bear on conceptual hypotheses. He was searching, he told Didier Eribon, for “small islands of organisation,” in among “a vast empirical stew.”²² I was curious to know how he had identified these islands. The process, he told me, was essentially one of trial and error.

For this reason he banned the use of tape recorders, so as “to feel at liberty to engage in mental struggle, explore odd byways, submit tentative ideas to the test of oral formulation”—a test he said he often failed.²³ He didn’t want what he considered risky, malformed ideas preserved on tape, to contradict him after he had ironed out the inconsistencies. Perhaps he need not have worried—time and again former students have commented on how incredibly clear his expositions were the first time around. “He spoke as he wrote,” said Philippe Descola, Lévi-Strauss’s student and in many ways his natural successor as the current director of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie and professor of anthropology at the Collège. Descola spoke to me in what had been Lévi-Strauss’s office, still containing the low-slung leather chair on which a much younger Descola had sat, terrified, when he had asked Lévi-Strauss to be his supervisor.²⁴ “It was like seeing Kant, Hegel,” Descola told me. “He was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century.” The office was now book lined and adorned with South American indigenous artifacts, including a mask with clumps of straw for hair and, in a cheeky, postmodern reference, the Arumbaya fetish from Tintin and the Broken Ear. “He built up complex sentences, piling up subclauses, but always landed on his feet,” Descola explained.²⁵

As a method, it was rather like Breton’s automatism—a kind of intellectual free association, which uncovered the hidden links between apparently unrelated data. Through this free jazz of the mind, Lévi-Strauss began exploring the connections that reproduced themselves in a metaphysical world of myth and mysticism. The first course he taught at the Fifth Section, the Visitation of the Souls, returned to his fieldwork in Brazil, looking at relations between the living and the dead among the Bororo. Lévi-Strauss had arrived too late to witness the early stages of Bororo funeral rites—the rotting of the body in an open grave, covered over with loose branches; the washing of the deceased’s bones in the stream, and their painting and adorning with feathers. But he had been present at the long and complex rites that followed.

Fifteen years later, Lévi-Strauss dissected what he had seen. Combining his own fieldwork with his library research in New York, he drew comparisons between the Bororo rituals and those of the North American Algonquian and the Sioux-speaking Winnebago and Omaha, looking at the spatial directions (east-west, up-down, left-right, etc.) as well as certain colors, animals and vegetables that proliferated through the rites. Recurrent symbols, such as the use of a shell for water, a rounded stone for the earth or a star for the sky, were for Lévi-Strauss a kind of “algebra” that could give mathematical shape to these apparently inchoate rituals. Using structural analysis, rich belief systems could be boiled down, reduced to simpler, more formal systems of fundamental oppositions. The resulting dual and tripartite configurations echoed the social organization of the groups. It was a kind of inversion of Durkheimian method, linking ideas, rituals and myth back to the social, rather than the other way round. “The relationship between the living and the dead,” Lévi-Strauss concluded with a kind of proto-structuralist simplification, “is no more than the projection, on the screen of religious thought, of real relations between the living.”²⁶

The following year Lévi-Strauss moved on to mythology, comparing the origin myths among the Hopi, Zuni and Acoma of the western/central Pueblo Indians. It was the beginning of his life’s work—a two-decade-long obsession that would take him further and further into the more obscure recesses of the indigenous imagination. The Mythologiques quartet would begin to appear only in the 1960s, but fragments were already coming together as early as 1952.

IN THE MIDDLE OF 1952 Lévi-Strauss traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to speak at a conference that brought together linguists and anthropologists. There, he began putting a cognitive, even neurological gloss on what he saw as the growing rapprochement between linguistics and anthropology. He made theatrical references to “the uninvited guest, the human mind,” arguing that language and culture had to be related in some way; otherwise the mind would either be “a complete jumble” or would consist of “compartments separated by rigid bulkheads.”²⁷ The quest lay in a systematic cultural analysis that would ultimately shed light on how the brain worked. “For centuries the humanities and social sciences have resigned themselves to contemplating the world of the natural and exact sciences as a kind of paradise which they will never enter,” he concluded, with an allusion to his introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. “All of a sudden there is a small door which is being opened between the two fields and it is linguistics which has done it.”²⁸ It was through this “small door” that Lévi-Strauss entered, searching for a communicating passage between anthropology and the hard sciences. His enormous influence as a postwar thinker would rest on this initial gamble, and his boldness in bringing together two very different types of inquiry. Over the next decade, scores of scholars from neighboring disciplines—literary criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy—would follow in behind him, looking for the rigor that linguistics had achieved.

In the same year, Lévi-Strauss’s contributions to a major anthropology symposium in New York drove his arguments further. The event, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, brought together eighty scholars to discuss the state of the art in anthropology. It featured many of the discipline’s leading lights, academics such as Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie and Julian Steward, whom Lévi-Strauss had met in New York during the war. They were joined by scholars from neighboring fields, such as the sociologist Robert Redfield and Lévi-Strauss’s friend and collaborator Roman Jakobson, for a wide-ranging discussion of the discipline’s achievements and its future.

Transcripts of Lévi-Strauss’s contributions show a mind sparking with new ideas, pushing the insights from structural linguistics in novel and eccentric directions. When asked to discuss how structural analysis could be used in domains outside linguistics, he returned to his half-formed thoughts on the differences between plant species that had occurred to him while he idled on the Maginot Line on the eve of the fall of France. Postwar research had confirmed his intuitions. Differences between species could indeed be systematically described in terms of permutations of core features. Just as in linguistics, scientists had nailed down small sets of contrasts—petals and carpels were either separated or united, stamens numerous or few, the corolla regular or irregular, and so forth—which, in different combinations, generated abundant diversity.²⁹ For Lévi-Strauss, the same genetic principal could be equally applied to a range of cultural domains, from fine art to tools, clothing to kinship and mythology.³⁰

Wherever Lévi-Strauss looked he saw formal connections. It was the early days of television, and the snowy images that the sets produced were still a novelty. He was intrigued to notice that low-frequency bands yielded only an outline, a mere sketch of a figure or an object, whereas high frequencies filled in the image, giving it the appearance of solidity. In a far-fetched analogy, he likened the contrast to art’s fundamental properties: the division between drawing and painting. Culture and technology, science and art were blending in the structural echo chamber of Lévi-Strauss’s mind, each revealing the other’s hidden properties.

Lévi-Strauss was already supplementing his prodigious ethnographic reading with Norbert Wiener on cybernetics and Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Through the prism of early digital theorizing, crossovers into the social sciences seemed plausible. “Communication is not only a field for linguistics,” Lévi-Strauss explained in the symposium, “but it can be said that society is, by itself and as a whole, a very large machine for establishing communication on many different levels between human beings.”³¹ The image revealed one wing of Lévi-Strauss’s early thought: a mechanistic outlook that refused to grant cultural phenomena any special metaphysical status. As chief engineer to this “very large machine,” Lévi-Strauss was tinkering with its components, drawing up blueprints of its various interlocking devices, measuring each rotation and monitoring the engine’s rhythms. Yet at the same time—and this disjuncture runs through the whole body of his work—Lévi-Strauss was not ultimately interested in the machine’s functions or outputs. Like Niki de Saint Phalle’s Stravinsky Fountain mobiles beside the Centre Pompidou, with their spouting hoses and whirring wheels, Lévi-Strauss’s cultural engine was an aesthetic contraption that worked, but to no discernible end.

In his concluding remarks at the symposium, Lévi-Strauss was asked to sketch anthropology’s progress so far and its prospects for the future, a task that he warmed to with an interesting take on the discipline’s formation. In the past, anthropology had fed off the scraps, the garbage left over by the established disciplines. In the Middle Ages virtually anything outside Europe was considered, in a philosophical sense, anthropological. With the rise of classical studies, mainstream scholars commandeered Indian and Chinese thought, restricting anthropology to Africa, Oceania and South America. In the modern setting, professional anthropology has been pushed further to the fringes, scavenging in the dustbins of academia. Paradoxically, the “ragpickers” had found gold. Driven to the extremes of human culture, anthropology was now on the point of making profound intellectual discoveries. (Margaret Mead took immediate exception to what she saw as Lévi-Strauss’s equation between indigenous culture and garbage, but his analogy was innocent. It was meant only in the sense that anthropologists were rummaging through the offcuts of other disciplines, as he subsequently explained, “picking up odds and ends.”)

Kant had envisaged the world as a division between the “starry skies” (Newtonian physics) and “moral law” (Kant’s own philosophy); anthropology, via linguistics, Lévi-Strauss concluded, was poised to unite these realms into a federated union of diverse, but related, disciplines:

Linguists have already told us that inside our mind there are phonemes and morphemes revolving, one around the other, in more or less the same way as planets go around the solar system; and it is in the expectation that this unification may take place that I feel anthropology may really have a meaningful and important function not only in the development of modern society but also in the development of science at large.³²

By the early 1950s, Lévi-Strauss’s vision was filling out. He believed that he was living in an era of massive theoretical convergence. In Paris he was meeting regularly with Jacques Lacan, the mathematician Georges Guilbaud and the linguist Émile Benveniste in cross-disciplinary discussions around the concept of structures and how principles in mathematics could be carried over into the human sciences.³³ His seminar course at the École had become a magnet for a new generation of thinkers exploring crossover ideas and soaking up findings from ethnography. Discussions ranged from linguistics to psychoanalysis, mathematics to atomic physics, but the core remained anthropology. Through structural analysis, Lévi-Strauss believed anthropology could become a kind of meta-science, capable of discovering not just the foundations of human cultural exchange, but deep laws that resonated through nature. In spite of career setbacks, he had a research program; it now even had a name. “If you had to pick a date for the birth of Lévi-Straussian structuralism,” wrote his Swiss biographer, Denis Bertholet, “it would be 1952: the articles of that year, in the universal ambition that they bring, mark the moment when the suffix ‘-ism’ can be legitimately added, in the history of thought, to the adjective ‘structural.’”³⁴

HIS GRAYING HAIR RECEDING, Lévi-Strauss was now in his mid-forties, hitting the middle-aged plateau. His youth had been disjointed, but ambitious. He had led the largest anthropological expedition of its time across Brazil and had lectured in São Paulo, New York and Paris. His kinship thesis had been published to wide acclaim. After a period of instability, his life was coming together again. From 1952, Lévi-Strauss mixed academic work with a new job, akin to his posting as cultural attaché in New York. Through Métraux, he was nominated as secretary-general of the International Social Science Council at UNESCO. The work was an empty ritual: “I tried to give the impression that an organization without goal or function had a reason for existing,” Lévi-Strauss remembered, a task made more difficult by the generous budgets, which “had to be justified with a semblance of activity.” After the breakup of his marriage to Rose-Marie Ullmo, Lévi-Strauss had begun a relationship with Monique Roman, whom he had met at Jacques Lacan’s house. Born of an American mother and a Belgian father, she was in her late twenties—eighteen years his junior—and was attending his course at the Sorbonne.

Reintegrated into Parisian intellectual life, Lévi-Strauss was becoming well known in certain circles—a relatively small set of interested specialists who attended his courses and spoke at his seminars. A solid, if unspectacular, career beckoned, as a middle-ranking academic surrounded by a coterie of disciples. His way forward would be unconventional for its times. In a sense Lévi-Strauss was forced to circumvent the university system in order finally to dominate it.

TWO KEY PUBLICATIONS enabled Lévi-Strauss to reach beyond the academy and find a new audience for his ideas: the short pamphlet Race et histoire (1952) and, far more important, his memoir, Tristes Tropiques (1955). Together they gave a layman’s version of what had been an involved, technical argument relayed largely in specialist journals. While Race et histoire drew Lévi-Strauss into a fiery and very public debate around some of the central tenets of anthropological orthodoxy, Tristes Tropiques fleshed out Lévi-Strauss’s public persona, transforming him from a promising academic into a revered intellectual figure.

Race et histoire, commissioned by Alfred Métraux at UNESCO, was one of a series of pamphlets that formed a part of the UN’s project to combat racism. It was a cultural relativist manifesto outlining positions that had been well rehearsed for many years in professional anthropological circles, but which were less known to the general public. Lévi-Strauss’s main target was the nineteenth-century notion of cultural evolution, which had survived into the 1950s as the commonsense understanding of human history. This was the story of steady progression from primitive hunter-gatherer bands, through to more sophisticated agricultural settlements, then on to classical empires, culminating in the great European civilizations.

Aside from being highly conjectural, this version of events was merely a trick of perspective, argued Lévi-Strauss, the product of a distorted, ethnocentric vision. It was impossible to compare cultures, as each had specialized in different areas, working for solutions to different problems. Lévi-Strauss likened the process to the spin of a roulette wheel in a casino. The same numbers brought different yields, depending on the bets laid. Working their own systems, many cultures had succeeded where the West had failed. Inuits and the Bedouin had excelled at life in inhospitable climates; other cultures were thousands of years ahead of the West in terms of integrating the physical and the mental, with yoga, Chinese “breath-techniques” and “the visceral control of the ancient Maoris.” Australian Aborigines, traditionally seen as at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, had one of the most sophisticated kinship systems in existence. Polynesians had specialized in soilless agriculture and transoceanic navigation; philosophy, art and music had flourished in different ways around the globe.³⁵

The counterattack came from Roger Caillois, a writer, sociologist and founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Diogène. Superficially, Caillois’s life had closely paralleled Lévi-Strauss’s. In the interwar years he had mixed academia with surrealism, joining Bataille and Leiris in the short-lived experiment of the Collège de sociologie, set up to pursue Mauss’s research into the sociology of the sacred, which combined surrealism and anthropology.³⁶ On the outbreak of the Second World War, Caillois found himself stranded in Argentina, where he taught and wrote. Like Lévi-Strauss, he had headed into the backlands, roving as far afield as Patagonia, subsequently writing eloquent accounts of his journeys. They met after the war in New York, when Lévi-Strauss, then cultural attaché, invited Caillois to give a talk. Both became acolytes of Dumézil; both developed a fascination for mythology. Their paths crossed again when they went head-to-head for Marcel Mauss’s old chair, which Lévi-Strauss had ended up securing. Erudite, cultured, an intense thinker and poetic writer, Caillois could have been Lévi-Strauss’s alter ego. “We ought to have got along,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.³⁷

But despite their similar formations, Caillois had come to radically different conclusions than Lévi-Strauss, which he explored in a critical review of Race et histoire, published in two parts in La Nouvelle revue française.³⁸ By the 1950s Caillois had cast off his youthful infatuation with surrealism, the irrational, the primitive, and was beginning to reassess his own sympathies. Surrealists and anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss saw their own society as sullied and hypocritical, and had naïvely sought purity, “safe at the opposite ends of the geographical spectrum.”³⁹ For Caillois, Lévi-Strauss’s veneration of preliterate cultures at the expense of the West was a question of inverse ethnocentrism—a twentieth-century disease of decadence and cultural malaise. Lévi-Strauss had perversely exaggerated the achievements of primitive societies. The complexities of aboriginal kinship systems said nothing about the aboriginal cultures themselves. What was an achievement, argued Caillois, was anthropology’s attempts to model them. The West’s openness to other cultures, the very existence of a discipline such as anthropology, was, for Caillois, a clear sign of superiority.⁴⁰

In “Diogène couché,” published in Les Temps modernes, Lévi-Strauss responded, launching a violent, thirty-three-page assault on Caillois. He reiterated his position, charging Caillois with crude ethnocentrism, accusing him of underestimating the mental efforts that went into constructing and sustaining so-called primitive cultures. Referring to his opponent as “M. Caillois” throughout, Lévi-Strauss pulled no punches. “America had its McCarthy and we have our McCaillois,”⁴¹ he wrote, portraying Caillois as a dangerously paranoid apologist for the West. The debate—a classic progressive-conservative battle in the culture wars of 1950s France—rumbled on in the following issue, which published an exchange of letters between Caillois and Lévi-Strauss. “The Caillois-Lévi-Strauss controversy has been the big event in Parisian literary circles,” Métraux wrote in a letter to the photographer and self-taught ethnographer Pierre Verger. “Lévi-Strauss’s response is a masterpiece of reasoning, language and cruelty.”⁴²

Caillois’s piece had clearly hit a nerve. “It made me very angry,” Lévi-Strauss recalled.⁴³ Years later, Caillois remembered being shocked, rendered speechless by the vehemence of the counterattack. The aggressiveness was, indeed, out of character for Lévi-Strauss, but an undercurrent of defensiveness ran beneath the rhetoric. Perhaps the most wounding of all Caillois’s criticisms was the accusation that Lévi-Strauss had been part of a group that was surrealist before being ethnographic. The implication was that Lévi-Strauss was an intellectual lightweight, following a poorly thought-out avant-garde vogue for the exotic, rather than a solid anthropological position.

Maneuvering himself away from the avant-garde, Lévi-Strauss repositioned himself in far less controversial territory—back to the very French tradition of using primitive cultures as “tuning forks” in philosophical debates. His intellectual interest in the “primitive” was more classical, a part of a genealogy running from Montaigne and Rabelais and passing through Swift, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, “a tradition of Western thought that presses an exoticism, real or imaginary, into service for a social criticism.” Contemporary fascination for the primitive was not merely a symptom of a twentieth-century crise de conscience, as Caillois had argued, but one that had produced classics such as Essais, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité and Candide. “I am not the person Caillois thinks I am,” Lévi-Strauss concluded with a rhetorical flourish, writing that perhaps this person, “a wavering surrealist, an amateur ethnographer, a muddleheaded radical”—surréaliste velléitaire, ethnographe amateur, agitateur brouillon—was closer to Caillois himself.⁴⁴

Lévi-Strauss was fighting for credibility, for gravitas in a small academic world that had already rebuffed him. He was trying to build his reputation as a serious academic, steering anthropology in a more rigorous, scientific direction. In this context, Caillois’s charge of being a dilettante was wounding. But Lévi-Strauss would soon find that it was Caillois who was out of step with the mood of the nation. Its confidence destroyed by the years of occupation, France was about to suffer a further string of defeats, as the age of empire sped toward its conclusion.