Claude Levi-Strauss

THE FRENCH EMPIRE, which had been in limbo through the occupation, had begun to unravel at the end of the Second World War. From the late 1940s on, there was unrest in Morocco, Cameroon, Madagascar and Algeria, with growing Vietminh resistance in French Indochina. In 1954, at Dien Bien Phu, a basin sunk into the hills of the modern-day Vietnamese-Laotian border, the French Empire went into retreat. After parachuting thousands of men in to secure a dilapidated Japanese-built airstrip, the French Expeditionary Forces were humiliatingly overpowered by Ho Chi Minh’s army—pounded by artillery from the high ground and reduced to trench warfare in the jungle valleys. Months after losing Indochina, France faced rebellion in her North African départements . The National Liberation Front maquisards (guerrillas) launched attacks across Algeria, beginning the traumatic and drawn-out loss of what was then seen as an integral part of France itself. By the mid-1950s the colonial paradigm, which had shaped not just geopolitical arrangements, but French attitudes and culture, was beginning to fall apart.

Postwar France was gripped by a renewed sense of pathos and disillusionment, but it was coupled with a growing interest in the non-Western cultures then emerging from beneath the imperial boot. Anthropologists became well-placed witnesses to this moment of revelation. Their field sites were at the margins of collapsing empires; the people they studied, after years relegated to bit parts in colonial sagas, were finding their voice. Culturally, the world was bending back on itself, rediscovering its own diversity, as one by one the imperial blocks began to disaggregate. The renaming of Lévi-Strauss’s chair was symbolic of the shifting sensibilities. When he took up the post it was called Religions of Uncivilized Peoples (Religions des peuples non civilisés), a title that became less and less tenable. On several occasions Lévi-Strauss remembered having his interpretations challenged by the “uncivilized” people themselves—African students studying at the Sorbonne. He eventually succeeded in modernizing the chair’s title to Comparative Religions of Peoples without Writing (Religions comparées des peuples sans écriture)—a firmer, more scientific designation, less likely to offend.

ONE OF THE many thinkers and writers who were sensing the changing mood was the geographer and ethnohistorian Jean Malaurie, a ruggedly handsome man with strong Gallic features, then in his late twenties. In the aftermath of the Second World War he had taken part in a series of scientific expeditions to Greenland. At around the same age as Lévi-Strauss when he had set off for Brazil, Malaurie had gone solo, traveling into the labyrinth of hummocks around Thule in the higher latitudes of the Arctic, in an expedition that had none of the trappings of Lévi-Strauss’s adventures. “I landed in Thule on July 23, 1950 . . . after twenty-three days at sea,” wrote Malaurie. “I immediately decided to spend the winter 150 kilometers farther north, in Siorapaluk: thirty-two inhabitants, six igloos . . . My equipment? There was none. I extracted permission from the Danish authorities to spend the winter there for one year once I was there.”²

In spite of the remoteness of their territories, the Inuit were also living on the edge of empire. While traveling through the region by dogsled, Malaurie had stumbled across what at first appeared to be a monstrous mirage—a fenced-off compound housing an anonymous steel installation, the noise of machinery muffled by the snowfields. It turned out to be a top secret U.S. Air Force nuclear base, one of the many springing up as part of a developing Cold War logic. Even in these Arctic wastes, the West was on the move, bumbling blithely into Inuit territories, with no thought of the impact this might have. Although not trained as an ethnographer, Malaurie produced the first written genealogical records of these Inuit groups and became a passionate advocate of their culture.

On his return, Malaurie was out walking in Paris when, on the spur of the moment, he knocked on the door of the publishers Plon and proposed an account of his adventures. At the same time he put forward a new idea for a series of books to be called Terre humaine. His timing was perfect. Postwar, publishers in France were reworking their nonfiction lists, turning for inspiration to the new wave of the humanities to meet the needs of an expanding educated readership. In 1950 Gallimard launched Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s Bibliothèque de philosophie. The Bibliothèque de psychanalyse et de psychologie clinique and the Bibliothèque de sociologie contemporaine came out under the imprint Les Presses universitaires de France in the same year. Soon afterward Plon responded with two new collections: Recherches en sciences humaines (1952) and Civilisations d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (1953).³

Terre humaine would be subtly different from what had gone before. Malaurie envisaged a series that would be a collection of “voyages philosophiques ” for the twentieth century, featuring modern-day savants on the move through the cultural hinterlands. The books would be intellectual but autobiographical, scientific yet engaged, feeding off the rich and largely unexplored literary terrain of indigenous cultures and ethnographic research.

By chance, Malaurie had come across Lévi-Strauss’s complementary thesis on the Nambikwara while browsing in Paris’s old university press library. He later confessed that he had found it boring, but while the ethnographic descriptions had left him cold, he had been captivated by the photographs—Lévi-Strauss’s expressive images of the nomadic Nambikwara. Perhaps as a counterpoint to his own experiences in the Arctic, Malaurie looked to the tropics for one of the first books in the new series, asking Lévi-Strauss if he could write a nonacademic book about his experiences in Brazil.

Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques joined the collection’s early titles along with Jean Malaurie’s own Les Derniers rois de Thulé; Victor Segalen’s docunovel about his turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiences in Tahiti, Les Immémoriaux; and Afrique ambiguë, by anthropologist Georges Balandier. Later Malaurie mixed in the autobiography of Native American Don Talayesva, Soleil Hopi, for which Lévi-Strauss would write a preface, as well as Margaret Mead’s Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies and her controversial classic Coming of Age in Samoa, under the title Moeurs et sexualité en Océanie.

Tristes Tropiques was a book of loss, of mourning, a middle-aged lament for the passing of time. It came out of a particular period in Lévi-Strauss’s personal life. On top of his divorce and related financial problems, his father, Raymond, had died in 1953. He had been hugely influential in Lévi-Strauss’s early years, something that he would fully realize only much later. The cultural references that Raymond had imparted to his son would shape the latter part of Lévi-Strauss’s career, and in interviews he would come back again and again to his experiences with his father.

Ironically, Tristes Tropiques represented a lowering of expectations around his career. Had he believed he was still in contention for the Collège de France, he later confessed, he would never have dared embark on something that could be seen as intellectually lightweight, but as it stood he felt he had nothing to lose. He had already dabbled with a more literary style of writing, with his abortive attempts at a novel. His notes from Brazil that had followed him around the world were still boxed up, a good deal of the material as yet unused. He was just entering middle age, trying to settle down and put his eventful past behind him. “I had a full bag that I wanted to unpack,” he later said.⁴

Lévi-Strauss had also sensed that his academic work lacked a human dimension. In spite of his aloofness, he was, after all, flesh and blood. “I was sick of seeing myself labelled in universities as a machine without a soul,” he told the historian François Dosse, with uncharacteristic feeling, “good only for putting men into formulas.”⁵ Nevertheless, he wrote Tristes Tropiques consumed by guilt, feeling that it was taking up time that should really have been devoted to proper academic work, like the second volume of his kinship studies, which he would never in fact write. This combination of guilt and liberation, the feeling that he was shirking his professional duties and the thrill that he might be burning his bridges once and for all produced an adrenal rush of activity. Over the winter of 1954-55, working at the astonishing pace of more than a hundred pages per month, he hammered through the first draft in “a permanent state of intense exasperation, putting in whatever occurred to me without any forethought.”⁶

Written on a small German typewriter that Lévi-Strauss had picked up in a bric-a-brac shop in São Paulo, the resulting manuscript, held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, is one continuous stream of words, with the occasional “changer de page” or “chapitre” typed midpage the only indication of a break in the narrative. As if working up a collage, Lévi-Strauss cut and pasted sections from old papers and notes onto the page, using strips of sticky tape, now brittle and yellowing with age. Whole chunks of his petite thèse, La Vie familiale et sociale des Indiens nambikwara, were included verbatim, stuck onto blank pages, modified only by replacing the academic nous with the more intimate je. Lévi-Strauss incorporated lectures, course notes and old articles. Chapter seventeen, for instance, which describes Lévi-Strauss’s first disappointing fieldwork experiences among the Tibagy and the Kaingang in the state of Paraná, was culled from “Entre os selvagens civilizados” (“Among the Civilized Savages”), an article he had written for the culture supplement of the Brazilian national newspaper the Estado de São Paulo. Since his own notebooks on the Caduveo had disappeared during the war, parts of chapters eighteen and nineteen were lifted from his wife Dina’s notes. And he filled out discussions of Nambikwara familial relations with an early Freudian interpretation of tribal dynamics, “The Social and Psychological Aspects of Chieftainship in a Primitive Tribe,” published during the war in Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Many of the aphorisms that seem to crop up spontaneously were actually copied directly from a green notebook that Lévi-Strauss used to jot down ideas as they came to him, such as: “The tropics are less exotic, than out of date”; “Napoléon is the Mohammed of the West”; and “Le moi est haïssable” (The self is detestable). Above this last he wrote, in red, “Pas de moi = ilyaun rien et un nous” (The absence of self = there is a nothingness and an us), which reappeared at the end of Tristes Tropiques as, “The self is not only hateful: there is no place for it between us and nothing.”⁷ (However, other interesting thoughts, like the cryptic “travel = the same and the reverse of a psychoanalysis,” were left out.)⁸ But there was much that was new, including a wealth of personal reminiscence, largely about Brazil, but also from his university days.

In between the spurts of speed-writing, some sections were labored over—particularly the often complex concluding sentences in which Lévi-Strauss tried to encapsulate his ideas on a given topic. In the preparatory notes he made for the book, there are five different versions of the last sentence in the section on Caduveo face painting, for instance. He ended up with a labored finale,⁹ but perhaps he would have been better off with one of the versions he rejected—the less cumbersome and more lyrical “In this charming civilization the fashions of the female beauties evoke a golden age; laws are turned into poetry, and rather than be expressed in codes, are sung through their finery as they reveal their nudity.”¹⁰ But what is remarkable about the original manuscript is that it is in fact only lightly edited. Comments in crimson ballpoint and blue pencil are mainly minor tightening of language—semble becomes est, for instance, or redundant adverbs like sans doute, complètement, profondément are scored out, as are the odd flippant remarks. After a discussion of the erotic effect of Caduveo face designs, for example, Lévi-Strauss exclaimed, “Our powders and rouges pale in comparison!,” but then decided against it.¹¹

The extraordinary speed of production showed up in the finished product. The first edition was littered with misspelled Portuguese words, many of which were simply rendered phonetically. There were no notes or bibliography—a great shame in a book that drew liberally from such a wide range of sources. At times Lévi-Strauss fell prey to the errors that creep in when passages are lifted from old, dimly remembered notebooks. He had evidently forgotten that he had lightly fictionalized a number of anecdotes that he had planned to use in his novel, changing the names of protagonists. These episodes were reimported unchanged into Tristes Tropiques. And his thoughts on the relationship between Chopin and Debussy are remarkably similar to an exchange in Sodome et Gomorrhe, the fourth volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, although this may have been an intentional allusion.¹²

The upside was the fresh but slightly disorganized feel of stream-of-consciousness typing that still makes the book an infectious read. The central narrative—Lévi-Strauss’s formation as an anthropologist, his posting in São Paulo and subsequent fieldwork in Mato Grosso—is constantly interrupted by pages on the idea of travel and travel writing, modernity’s depressing uniformity, man’s impact on his environment, the relative merits of world cities and religions. Sections of his aborted novel, the ideas for the play L’Apothéose d’Auguste, penned in desperation during a lull in fieldwork, stanzas of poetry that came to him in the Amazon, and thoughts on music crop up at intervals. At times the reader feels as if he is in a lecture theater, at others lumbering across the dusty savannah or tramping through the mulch of a tropical forest. By the end, as Lévi-Strauss takes on Islam, compares Buddhism to Marxism and muses on the ultimate futility of our quest for meaning, the reader seems to be inside Lévi-Strauss’s head.

“Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs” (I hate traveling and explorers)—that first, posturing, deliberately provocative sentence announced the arrival of a new voice on the Parisian scene. The opening pages of Tristes Tropiques are a full-throttle rant against the whole genre of travel writing and the midcentury explorers and adventurers who entertained Parisian high society. For Lévi-Strauss they were frauds, evoking an exoticism that had long since disappeared, peddling stale genre prose like: “At five thirty in the morning, we entered the harbour at Recife amid the shrill cry of gulls, while a fleet of boats laden with tropical fruits clustered around the hull.” The anthropologist, on the other hand, traveled only because he had to, wasting precious time hunting for truths—the myths, rituals or kin structures—that were hidden in the far-flung reaches of the world. The story of his adventures was merely “dross” obscuring his more scholarly findings.¹³

Yet at the same time, Tristes Tropiques is itself unquestionably a travel book of sorts, even as it parodies the genre. Perhaps there was an element of sly self-criticism in Lévi-Strauss’s hierarchy between the anthropologist and the so-called explorer. We know from letters to the German anthropologist Nimuendajú that at times Lévi-Strauss felt like little more than a casual day-tripper himself: “I know absolutely nothing about the social organization of the Kaingang,” he wrote in one. “I met them on what was in effect a tourist expedition, with no scope at all for work.”¹⁴ Even his longer expeditions have the weightless, itinerant feel of the explorer’s restlessness that he excoriates in the first chapter of Tristes Tropiques. The sense of being constantly on the move, the descriptions of the rapidly changing environment and the mishaps—the herder Emídio’s mutilated hand, Lévi-Strauss’s own experiences of being lost on the savannah, the eye infection—are the staples of adventurers’ tales.

In fact, Tristes Tropiques was a clever combination of travel writing and ethnography. One leavened the other in what was, after L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris’s candid journal of his participation in Griaule’s Dakar- Djibouti expedition, the first behind-the-scenes account of being an anthropologist. The ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss explained in an interview given following the book’s publication,

is like a photographer, condemned to use a telephoto lens; he only sees the natives, and he sees them in the minutest detail. Without renouncing all that, I wanted to enlarge the field, to admit the landscape, the non-primitive populations, the ethnologist himself at work or doubting, questioning himself about his profession.¹⁵

Like Leiris, Lévi-Strauss described the boredom and the uncertainties of the fieldwork experience, the false promises of the exotic and the realities of colonial frontiers. At the same time, Tristes Tropiques was hardly a wide-angled shot. What was missing were the others—Dina, Vellard and Castro Faria barely rate a mention; the drivers, the herders, the missionaries and the canoeists appear only fleetingly in what is often a more intimate drama between the anthropologist and “the savage.” Sometimes it is as if Lévi-Strauss is alone in the field, communing with his informants, winkling out the secrets of their cultures.

The book has nevertheless become a landmark in anthropology. It was one of the first to blend confessional literature and ethnography, in what would become known as “reflexive” ethnography, a genre that would blossom from the 1960s onward. The impossibility of absolute objectivity in any scientific enterprise, acutely felt in the social sciences, brought ethnographers face-to-face with a philosophical dilemma, something that Lévi-Strauss grasped only after the fact. Again resorting to the camera lens analogy, he put a positive spin on a book that he had once seen as a distraction from his academic research:

In retrospect, I must admit that in Tristes Tropiques there is a certain scientific truth which is perhaps greater than in our objective works because what I did was to reintegrate the observer into the object of his observation. It’s a book written with a lens that’s called a fish-eye, I think . . . It shows not only what is in front of the camera but also what is behind the camera. And so, it is not an objective view of my ethnological experiences, it’s a look at myself living these experiences.¹⁶

A slow-burning pessimism, a lament at the progressive loss of our links—sensual, intellectual and cultural—to the world around us pervades the book. Its pathos caught the postwar mood perfectly, particularly in France. For Lévi-Strauss, globalization was creating a bleak world of architectural and cultural uniformity. Polynesian islands, once idylls of natural beauty, were being concreted over, while Asia’s delicate network of local cultures was turning into vast gray suburbs. A world that from today’s perspective seems relatively untouched was already sensing that the circle was closing. Man was soiling his own nest. “The first thing we see when we travel around the world,” Lévi-Strauss wrote in despair, “is our own filth, thrown into the face of humanity.”¹⁷

Anthropologists were but another aspect of Western expansion, their very presence a sign that the rot had already set in. By the time Lévi-Strauss’s team had reached the Nambikwara, they were already cooking their meals in rusty jerry cans dumped by local motorboat operators. (Look closely at Lévi-Strauss’s photographs of the Nambikwara and, in among the bows and arrows, gourds and woven baskets, there is also an assortment of smaller tins, planks of wood, bottles and enamel plates.)¹⁸ Lévi-Strauss found himself “caught within a circle from which there is no escape.” Centuries before, in a more diverse, culturally atomized world, travelers were exposed to untold riches, but through ignorance responded with indifference or active prejudice. Now, just as greater contact and interpenetration have opened these worlds up to us, they are disintegrating before our eyes, like parchments turning to dust in our hands.

More than a philosophy or a worldview, a whole style of thought was on display in Tristes Tropiques with Lévi-Strauss’s trademark fascination with symmetry and inversion. The Buddhist sage and the Muslim prophet are polar opposites: “One is chaste, the other is potent, with four wives; one is androgynous, the other bearded, one peaceable, the other bellicose, one exemplary and the other messianic.”¹⁹ Traveling from Europe to Brazil involved a threefold mutation—from the Old to the New World, from the northern to the southern hemisphere, from a temperate to a tropical climate; from being poor, he had become rich, prompting his transformation from the disciplined and thrifty to the spontaneous and profligate. A curious meal in the bush town of Rosário at the outset of the Serra do Norte expedition apparently consisted of half a chicken roasted and half cold; half a fish fried and the other half boiled.²⁰ Lévi-Strauss’s mind was constantly fitting his experiences into geometric models, with axes, dimensions and inverse relationships. In Tristes Tropiques this comes across as a stylistic tic; in his more academic writings it was already becoming synonymous with structuralism as a method.

At the core of Tristes Tropiques was ethnography. Although many of the sections on the Nambikwara and the Bororo were reworkings of old material, the chapter on the Caduveo was a creative reinterpretation of what he’d seen on the Brazil-Paraguay borderlands fifteen years earlier. Casting his mind back to the Caduveo women and their strange arabesques, the interlocking designs that weaved across their necks and faces, Lévi-Strauss likened them to the playing-card characters in Lewis Car-roll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Like cards in a deck, the Caduveo patterns were characterized by similarity and difference, symmetry and asymmetry. It was a “hall of mirrors” effect—the inverted scrolls and arabesques refracting along axes, line playing off surface, angle contrasting with curve, pattern with background.

For Lévi-Strauss, these designs were not merely aesthetic inventions, passed down and perfected through the generations. They were subconscious meditations on structures found in traditional Caduveo social organization. This culture, a highly stratified system of intermarrying castes, which Lévi-Strauss compared to medieval European society, was in mourning for the loss of reciprocity to hierarchy, solidarity to division. The fissures and contradictions of their rigid social systems found expression in the subtle imbalances of the designs’ alternating motifs. Caduveo art was in the last instance “a phantasm of society” expressing, at a subconscious level, the unease, the anxieties, the conflicts involved in being Caduveo.²¹

At the end of this strange yet somehow compelling analysis, Lévi-Strauss went one step further: parallels could be drawn between the formal properties of Caduveo art and Bororo hut plans. Although less dysfunctional than the Caduveo, the Bororo system had its own partially unresolved contradictions. It too was at once balanced and unstable, with its complicated combination of dual and tripartite social groupings. Lévi-Strauss’s broader theoretical point was that structural echoes could be found in many aspects of social and cultural life—art, metaphysics, social systems, even the positioning of huts in a village. Again and again the human mind threw up similar relationships across domains that at first glance seemed completely unconnected.

What had previously been expressed in the hard-to-follow language of structural linguistics and technical kinship analysis had found its poetic expression. Shorn of their academic overlay, the ideas had a simple appeal. Tristes Tropiques hinted at a panhuman bond, even as it distanced Western thought from the output of indigenous cultures around the world. It showed indigenous culture in a new light, as creative but systematized, idiosyncratic yet ultimately of a piece.

DURING 1955 TRISTES TROPIQUES was unveiled to the public. A fifty-page extract first appeared in Les Temps modernes in August as “Des Indiens et leur ethnographe” (Indians and Their Ethnographer).²² Taken from the middle of the book, the selection opened with a manifesto of the structuralist outlook:

The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems. I am of the opinion that the number of such systems is not unlimited and that—in their games, dreams or wild imaginings—human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repertoire that it should be possible to define. By making an inventory of all recorded customs . . . one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements . . .²³

Systems over individuals; instinct over creativity—this was hardly the kind of philosophical orientation likely to appeal to the journal’s editors, among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In the book itself, which appeared in October, Lévi-Strauss was more direct, taking calculated jabs at existentialism and the prevailing subjectivist philosophical mood. Existentialism’s “overindulgent attitude towards the illusions of subjectivity,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, reduced philosophy to “shopgirl metaphysics” (métaphysique pour midinette).²⁴ The core problem, as he saw it, was “understanding being in relationship to itself, not in relationship to oneself ”—that is to say, mapping how facts in the world relate to one another rather than trying to grasp their particular import for us, how we perceive them or what we see as their significance. For Lévi-Strauss, existentialism agonized over the very material that should be filleted out and discarded. Even so, Sartre apparently liked Tristes Tropiques for the confessional intimacy of Lévi-Strauss’s warts-and-all descriptions of fieldwork—what he saw as the revelation of the observer in the act of observing.²⁵

Indeed, it was precisely Lévi-Strauss’s grappling with his own “illusions of subjectivity” that made the book an unqualified success with the critics when it appeared in print in the autumn. The genre-bending mix of confessional, travelogue, philosophy and science brought forward comparisons to the great innovators of the past. Raymond Aron, writing in Le Figaro, likened Tristes Tropiques to Montesquieu’s satirical epistolary novel Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters); Combat compared Lévi-Strauss to his boyhood hero Cervantes; while for the writer and critic François-Régis Bastide, Lévi-Strauss was the new Chateaubriand.²⁶

For once nonfiction had trumped the novel as a vehicle for ideas and contemporary observation. Tristes Tropiques was avidly devoured not just by academics, but by artists like the playwright and key figure in the “theater of the absurd” Jacques Audiberti, who wrote congratulating him—the beginning of a long correspondence between the two. Even though, as a work of nonfiction, Tristes Tropiques was not eligible for France’s most prestigious award for literary fiction, the Prix Goncourt, members of the academy issued a communiqué saying that they regretted they could not consider Tristes Tropiques for the 1955 prize. In an ironic twist, the following year Lévi-Strauss was offered another prize by the jury of the Golden Pen—for travel writing. He turned it down.

Tristes Tropiques’s reputation soon spread beyond France. In 1957 the book appeared in Portuguese in Brazil, where the Estado de São Paulo gave it a glowing three-part review. As a historical memoir of Brazil in the 1930s, it was “one of the most remarkable studies ever written on contemporary Brazil,” in a field in which impressionistic accounts written by foreigners predominated, although the piece went on to say that Lévi-Strauss was not beyond a form of European condescension in his more critical passages.²⁷ In the same year, although it had not yet been translated into English, the Times Literary Supplement gave the work a long front-page review; this was followed by another positive assessment in 1961 when the first English translation appeared under the title of A World on the Wane.²⁸ While in America, the critic Susan Sontag, writing in 1963 in the then recently launched New York Review of Books, hailed Tristes Tropiques as “one of the great books of our century.” “It is rigorous, subtle and bold in thought,” she continued. “It is beautifully written. And, like all great books, it bears an absolutely personal stamp ...”²⁹

Tristes Tropiques was certainly original in many respects, but Lévi-Strauss also drew heavily on his contemporaries. His memoir fit into a long tradition of French intellectuals leaving the metropolis behind for enlightenment on the road. It was the South American counterpart to André Gide’s Voyage au Congo (1927), and owes much to Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme (1934). The tone of Paul Nizan’s diatribe against French academia in Aden Arabie pervades Lévi-Strauss’s much-cited early chapter “Comment on devient ethnographe” (rendered as “The Making of an Anthropologist” in the English edition). There are hints of Conrad and Proust, both of whom Lévi-Strauss greatly admired. His long passages on the geological impact of human settlement followed the writings of his friend and colleague the tropicalist geographer Pierre Gourou.

The French travel writer, novelist and professional flâneur Pierre Mac Orlan, whose books Lévi-Strauss had read and loved in his youth, provided another strand. Lévi-Strauss’s explosive opening echoes Mac Orlan’s Petit manuel du parfait aventurier—a long essay published in 1920, which took a philosophical look at the whole notion of travel. True exploration was at an end, Mac Orlan argued, dividing modern-day travelers into those driven by the need for conquest, fame or fortune and the more cerebral, contemplative type whose aim was to evoke a place, a people, a culture, rather than reach a destination. More generally, Mac Orlan’s style of writing, his familiar, cosmopolitan tone, his combination of erudition and intimacy, his penchant for ports, backstreets and colorful lowlifes served as an unconscious template for Lévi-Strauss. After the publication of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss was thrilled to receive a “particularly moving” letter of congratulation from Mac Orlan. “I knew I had written Tristes Tropiques with Mac Orlan in mind,” Lévi-Strauss recalled after his retirement. “He probably liked my book because without realising it he found things in there that came from him.”³⁰

FOR MANY, TRISTES TROPIQUES was more than simply a mesmerizing read—it was life-changing. After reading it, Pierre Clastres switched from philosophy to anthropology and headed for South America. “I remember that Pierre Clastres was crazy about Tristes Tropiques, and had read it four or five times,” recalled his friend and fellow convert Alfred Adler. The Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch, a student of Griaule’s, had a similar revelatory experience. He had skimmed Structures élémentaires before setting off for fieldwork in Africa in the early 1950s. There he had set off on a Griaule-style quest, deep into the forests of the Belgian Congo. “In the utopian hope of gaining esoteric knowledge, I had myself initiated into a secret society, ‘the masters of the forest.’ But all the mysteries led to dead ends.” He returned to France disillusioned. But he then read Tristes Tropiques and met Lévi-Strauss in his UNESCO office. “It was the beginning of a long dialogue,” he recalled. “I might have given up ethnology, having been disappointed by fieldwork if, at this critical juncture, Lévi-Strauss had not revealed the possibility of a comparative study of ‘archaic’ societies.” When he returned to Africa, de Heusch embarked on a structural analysis of Bantu myth.³¹

Jean Pouillon, the philosopher and close friend of Jean-Paul Sartre, was another of the many thinkers inspired by the book. After reading Tristes Tropiques he went back over all of Lévi-Strauss’s published work, writing a laudatory summary—“L’Oeuvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss”—in Les Temps modernes.³² (Intriguingly, in his review Pouillon referred to a forthcoming book by Lévi-Strauss entitled Ethnologie et marxisme, which never in fact appeared.) During this period Pouillon began attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminars, before moving over to anthropology. By 1958 he was in Chad, savoring his own bittersweet experiences of ethnographic fieldwork.

The book had a crystallizing effect, drawing the disaffected into a new intellectual paradigm, as it evoked the brewing melancholy of a soon-to-be postcolonial France. Lévi-Strauss clothed new ideas with a world-weariness, giving them a gravitas that appealed to a certain type of intellectual. “I was sensitive to the pessimism, to this end-of-the-road aspect,” remembered another of his future long-term collaborators, Michel Izard, about first coming across Tristes Tropiques.³³

Through Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss was gathering acolytes, the foot soldiers of the coming structuralist revolution. But as his reputation grew, the critics circled. Caillois had attacked from the right; the historian Maxime Rodinson took him on from the left. Rodinson, a Jewish Marxist historian specializing in the Middle East, had been radicalized early. As lower-middle-class tailors, his Russian émigré parents had joined the French Communist Party soon after its formation. They later perished in Auschwitz in 1943 while Rodinson was serving in Syria and Lebanon. In two articles for La Nouvelle critique, Rodinson picked up on what he felt to be Lévi-Strauss’s ultimate political agnosticism. How could political progress be possible in a world of disparate cultural invention—each creation apparently as valid as the next? Coming from a Marxist perspective, Rodinson argued that anthropologists fetishized the trivial, putting games, material culture or rituals on an equal footing with core socioeconomic realities such as the division of property or labor. Tristes Tropiques’s relativist outlook, he concluded, denied the possibility of revolutionary change, a stance that would “bring desperation to Billancourt”—Paris’s industrial hub, where the highly unionized Renault workers were fighting for better pay and conditions.

While parallels between French factory workers and Nambikwara nomads might seem far-fetched, many would share Rodinson’s critique with more pointed examples from colonial conflict zones. In spite of Lévi-Strauss’s diatribes against the West, his lofty philosophical tone refused political engagement. “Lévi-Strauss led us to this peaceful place,” the anthropologist Alban Bensa told me. “It was a kind of escapism from the realities of twentieth-century indigenous life.” Bensa, who has written classic ethnographies of the Kanak of New Caledonia, was one of the many anthropologists of the following generation who, like Rodinson, would come to question structuralism from a political perspective. He found its stillness and symmetry out of step with the violent late-twentieth-century world he was witnessing in New Caledonia. “Lévi-Strauss painted a perfect picture, of everything fitting into an overarching scheme. But when I started going into the field and seeing the effects of colonialism, I began to have my doubts.”

In the 1950s, this strand of thought was typified by Georges Balandier, a key figure in the formation of anthropology in France. Like Lévi-Strauss, Balandier had started out as a militant socialist; unlike Lévi-Strauss, his fieldwork in Africa on the eve of decolonization had radicalized him even further. Between 1946 and 1951, he worked in Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Gabon and Congo and became actively involved in the brewing emancipation movements. What he found there was not the wistful remnants of once great indigenous cultures, but grinding poverty and the political backlash against centuries of exploitation. Interviewed by historian François Dosse, he drew diametrically opposite conclusions to Lévi-Strauss’s brand of hopeless pessimism:

I can in no way accept the idea that in these societies myth shapes everything and history is absent, in the name of a notion in which everything is a system of relations and codes, with a logic of possible permutations that enables the society to maintain an equilibrium . . . societies are not produced, they produce themselves; none escapes history even if history is made differently and even if there are multiple histories.³⁴

As colleagues and friends at UNESCO, Lévi-Strauss and Balandier were still on good terms in the 1950s, but would diverge thereafter. The more radical students—such as the left-wing writer and intellectual Régis Debray and anthropologists Marc Augé and Emmanuel Terray—attended Balandier’s courses, forming a rift at the heart of the humanities in France. Decolonization, after all, was then being hotly debated as the struggle in Algeria intensified. While Balandier and his students protested against France’s role in the war, Lévi-Strauss’s interest in politics was declining—a radical position in itself, in an era in which political engagement was the sine qua non of the Parisian intellectual.

In France, colonialism—particularly in relation to the deteriorating situation in Algeria—had become the subject of passionate debate. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the year that Tristes Tropiques appeared Lévi-Strauss engaged in what would be his final high-profile political act.³⁵ He joined Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton and Georges Bataille, among others, in signing a letter, published in November in L’ Express, supporting the creation of a comité d’action (action committee) for peace in Algeria. But thereafter he shied away from political involvement. By the late 1950s he described political thinking as “an essentially emotional attitude,” which had nothing to do with his role as a leading intellectual. ³⁶ In 1960 he declined to participate in the high-profile “Manifeste des 121,” a petition supporting Algerian independence, signed by a roll call of the era’s leading lights.³⁷ Years later he would even forget that he had signed the 1955 letter.³⁸

Even his rhetorical opposition to colonialism could have a conservative undertow. In 1956, he appeared to support the thinking behind Britain’s catastrophic withdrawal from India, the aftermath of which he had witnessed firsthand, with this comment:

Fifty years of modest, unprestigious research carried out by a sufficient number of ethnologists would have prepared Vietnam and North Africa for the solutions of the type that England managed in India—in a matter of months—thanks to the scientific effort that she had pursued for a century: maybe there is still time in black Africa and Madagascar.³⁹

Politically, Tristes Tropiques may have pointed in the conservative direction in which Lévi-Strauss was drifting, but as a work of nonfiction, it was ahead of its time. Blurring the boundaries between serious academic literature, memoir and travel writing, he had created a hybrid that, although commonplace today, was rare in the 1950s, when the bulwarks between academic and popular writing were still fortified. This brought resentment from insiders, such as Paul Rivet, for whom the book was akin to a betrayal. He broke off contact with Lévi-Strauss, making peace only on his deathbed.⁴⁰ The disaffected, though, were far outnumbered by new readers, eager for a glimpse into the world of the professional anthropologist.

After the success of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss was apparently still toying with the idea of continuing his literary writing career, perhaps as a journalist.⁴¹ But it is difficult to imagine him sheering off at this point. If anything, his commitment to academia was strengthening. At the same time as he was fantasizing about feature writing, he was applying for funds from the Rockefeller Foundation to set up an anthropological institute (he was turned down), while continuing his courses at the École pratique des hautes études. In the winter of 1955-56 he returned to the more technical earlier work on kinship with a course entitled Prohibitions du Mariage.

In spite of his earlier rejections, through the second half of the 1950s his star began to rise once more. His financial problems now behind him, he moved back into the sixteenth arrondissement with his new wife, Monique Roman, into a solidly bourgeois apartment block where he lived until his death, and where I would meet him on a dark February morning half a century later. He installed his library, by then a formidable collection spanning the world, arranging his books not alphabetically or by theme, but geographically, with North America above Brazil, Africa under Europe. His new home was consecrated with the birth of his second son, Matthieu, in 1957. “My life had changed,” recalled Lévi-Strauss.⁴²

But the mere thought of Lévi-Strauss as a reporter or novelist is tantalizing. Sadly, Tristes Tropiques has remained a one-off. Other than the odd short essay, like his later reminiscences about wartime New York, he would never return to the genre. The passion that drove Lévi-Strauss to write Tristes Tropiques was extinguished as soon as it had served its purpose, just as its subject matter—his intense relationship with Brazil in the 1930s—had faded on his return to France.

TRISTES TROPIQUES gallops to a close. As if receding into a mythical prehistory, the Bororo, Caduveo and Nambikwara disappear back into their remote forests and scrublands. The Brazilian backdrop changes abruptly to that of the Indian subcontinent, where Lévi-Strauss had recently traveled, the empty South American wastes giving way to the human density of the East. Days become centuries stretched into millennia, as Lévi-Strauss talks about all human history, world religions and philosophy.

He reserved his harshest judgment for Islam, a religion he saw as dangerously exclusive and xenophobic, incapable of seeing beyond itself and its own suffocating system. Its austerity, its combination of rigid rules, obsessive cleanliness and the marginalization of women made it “an ideal barrack-room religion.”⁴³ Part of his revulsion had to do with an uneasy self-recognition. In Islam, Lévi-Strauss saw a reflection of certain tendencies in French thought: the same backward-looking orientation, the same blind faith in abstract solutions, the same dogged application of doctrine and a haughty disdain of other cultures.⁴⁴ Though himself a nonbeliever, he was not opposed to religion per se. “I get along better with believers than out-and-out rationalists,” he told Didier Eribon. “At least the first have a sense of mystery—a mystery that the mind, it seems to me, is inherently incapable of solving.”⁴⁵ But what he saw as Islam’s doctrinaire approach rankled, and throughout his life he would air his dislike of the religion again and again, courting controversy in a progressively more multicultural, multifaith France.

In the final pages of Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss searched for an alternative. He returned to his stay in the Chittagong hill tracts, in a small, impoverished Buddhist village where the soft tolling of the gong mingled with the sounds of schoolchildren rote-learning the Burmese alphabet. Accompanied by village priests, he climbed barefoot through clayey soils up a hill to the jédi—a rudimentary pagoda composed of earthworks fenced off by bamboo. A thatched hut on stilts, with woven bamboo flooring, brass statues and a stag’s head, served as a temple. After washing the mud from their feet, they went in. “A peaceful barn-like atmosphere pervaded the place and there was the smell of hay in the air,” wrote Lévi-Strauss. The room was like “a hollowed-out haystack,” and the muffled acoustics, the simplicity, the stillness drew him in as he observed the priests prostrating themselves before the shrine.⁴⁶

Repelled by Islam, Lévi-Strauss found an intellectual kinship with Buddhism, which he saw as a corollary of his own philosophical outlook. ⁴⁷ Like a Buddhist priest, he sought the erasure of the self and the dissolution of meaning. His structuralist method operated on a kind of a meditative loop of unanchored existence, endlessly combining and recombining elements, emptying them of their original significance. Buddhism was accepting of a paradox that underlined all human endeavor, summarized in Lévi-Strauss’s unsettlingly convoluted formula: “Truth lies in a progressive dilating of meaning, but in reverse order, up to the point at which it explodes.”⁴⁸ Both Buddhist and “savage” thought constantly edged toward this spiritual zone in which all distinctions between meaning and its absence fall away, where “fluid forms are replaced by structures and creation by nothingness.”⁴⁹ The quest was one of total immersion, of unintellectualized embodiment. Like the seamless mixing of the religious and the everyday among the Bororo, who would conjure spirits with whirling bull-roarers in the men’s house, where they also slept, worked and socialized, Buddhism appeared to integrate deep spirituality with everyday life, making each mentally attuned to the other.

The blend was seductive: on its own, structuralism could appear brutalist and reductive, but framed within Buddhism it took on an element of mystery. Just as Lévi-Strauss’s raw materials—the dreamlike Pueblo myths, the colorful Bororo funerary rites, sensual body art and so forth—softened the blow of abstraction, so a hint of mysticism would help popularize his theories.

Yet his outlook could also be bleak. “The world began without man and will end without him,” he wrote. Man’s endeavors are merely a “transient effervescence,” a fizzing chemical reaction destined to burn itself out, ending in sterility and inertia. Anthropology should be renamed “entropology,” he concluded, since it is really recording a process of the breaking down, the dismantling of structures, as cultures like the Nambikwara disaggregate, losing their special forms and ideas.⁵⁰ The Nambikwara, as Lévi-Strauss had documented them, were already halfway there, scavenging on the edge of a degraded frontier.

“And yet I exist,” Lévi-Strauss wrote, offering a glimmer of hope, only to go on, “not, of course, as an individual,” but as a precarious stake “in the struggle between another society, made up of several thousand million nerve cells lodged in the anthill of my skull, and my body, which serves as its robot.” There was no escape. From both the far-off vision of cosmological time to the intimacy of the self, all was infused with fatalism. Between the “transient effervescence” of human history and the “anthill” of Lévi-Strauss’s skull there could be little hope, warmth or joy. In the end, the prose gathering pace for one last grandiose thought, all that we could hope for was direct, unmediated experience, the kind of raw sensuality that was still central to indigenous culture—the scent of a lily, the beholding of a precious stone, “or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.”⁵¹

The final chapters of Tristes Tropiques completed Lévi-Strauss’s vision—a melancholic fusion of science, philosophy and asceticism. Just as his more academic work was looking forward with optimism to the new scientific horizons being opened up by linguistics and computing, so a backward-looking, romantic strain was merging with shades of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Proust. This middle-aged bass note resonated through his mature work, introducing the hint of darkness and drama to an oeuvre that was finding its shape.