Claude Levi-Strauss

IN THE MID-1930S, Lévi-Strauss had driven René Courtin’s deteriorating Ford through the rust-colored earth of central Brazil. Out on the flats they had sped past a building site—“half vacant lot and half battlefield, bristling with electronic cable poles and survey posts.” The future state capital, Goiânia, was being built from scratch on an empty plain.² By the late 1950s, a little to the east of Goiânia, architects had embarked on an even more ambitious project. Engineers marked out Brasília’s superquadras onto a grid ruled into a low basin, a thousand kilometers from the coast. As the site was not yet connected by road, construction companies had to fly in thousands of tons of gravel, steel and machinery at exorbitant cost. Workers poured vast quantities of concrete, sculpting it into convex and concave forms, ramps and curved perimeters. By the end of the decade rows of ministry buildings lined the airplane-shaped design’s central fuselage, a cascade of treeless lawns crisscrossed by multi-lane highways and overpasses. Later, geometric neighborhoods duplicated themselves down the wings.

Brasília was a peculiarly 1950s vision, built around clean lines and mathematical layouts. The era’s models of tidy apartment blocks on stilts, sparse open spaces studded with evenly spaced shrubs, and cars whizzing along empty tarmac were spellbinding in miniature, but disorienting to scale. Architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s original proposal had in fact been based on fifteen freehand sketches and a short statement. The detail—the population studies, economic or social-impact assessments, notions of how this blueprint would actually function as a living city—was absent. To this day, Brasília is a difficult city to walk around in.

In the mid-1980s, half a century after he had driven through the region, Lévi-Strauss stopped off in Brasília on a state visit with President Mitterrand. Remarkably, it was the first time he had been back to Brazil since his fieldwork days, not through lack of invitation or opportunity, but through an odd indifference to the country in which he had begun his career as an anthropologist and which had given him the raw material for his best-selling memoir. When I asked him what he had thought about Brasília, it was difficult to gauge any reaction, positive or negative. Probing a possible affinity between the ideas behind Brasília and structuralism, I met with Lévi-Strauss’s hasty repudiation of any links between his own work and modernism. But what about his earlier association with the group of intellectuals that had formed around Mário de Andrade, a figure central to Brazil’s nascent modernist movement in São Paulo? Lévi-Strauss was quick to clarify that he felt drawn to them for political, rather than artistic, reasons. They were a left-leaning oasis in an otherwise authoritarian desert, he explained.³

Yet Lévi-Strauss was of his time. He influenced and in turn was influenced by a specific cultural moment, a shifting of interests and orientations. In the 1950s a certain austerity reigned. Early modernism’s hectic energy was dissipating, artistic expression cooling off into a more cerebral abstraction. It was a moment of stillness, of formal analysis, of simple furniture and anonymous suits. Echoes of the Lévi-Straussian turn toward disembodied systems were appearing across the arts. His blend of rationalism and mysticism, logic and enigma was in the air. A strain of thinkers, artists and musicians was delving into a more impersonal world of objects, colors and sounds and their relationships.

In a run-down studio in Paris, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was fiddling with primitive switchboards, shredding melody and cutting and splicing sounds, combining lifeless electronic noises into eerie soundscapes in his quest for “a structure to be realised in an Étude.” Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was in Paris as well, composing a new kind of music that used models from the hard sciences to structure sounds spatially. Waveforms plotted on graph paper were converted into unsettling scores such as Metastasis (1953-55). Similarly, Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen’s serialism involved experiments with mathematical techniques of composition using abstract templates—grids of time codes, levels and pitch. As Alex Ross observed in his history of twentieth-century music, postwar avant-garde composition fit into a Cold War laboratory-experiment aesthetic. Gone were works named in the neoclassical fashion, the scherzos or sinfoniettas—“the archaic titles dropped from sight, replaced by phrases with a cerebral tinge: Music in Two Dimensions, Syntax , Anepigraphe. There was a vogue for abstracts in the plural: Perspectives , Structures, Quantities, Configurations . . . ,⁴ as well as for high-tech parodies of tradition, such as Stockhausen’s Le Microphone bien tempéré (1952).

In the visual arts, the baroque fantasies of the surrealists and expressionists gave way to a more distant, contemplative posture. On the canvases of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko great blocks of color substituted visual narrative for rumination, while in France art informel was putting an abstract gloss onto improvisational techniques. Matter painting, the Color Field approach, Group Zero—Cold War art was emptying out content, delving back into an academic discourse around the very act of artistic expression. This was not the modernist optimism of the first-wave geometric abstract art—the Mondrians and the Maleviches—but rather a dimmed pensiveness, a trailing off. It referred not to some promised utopia, but to a mythic present, the mind in communion with itself. French avant-garde fiction, which became known as the nouveau roman, was based on a similarly flattening effect. The novel’s very substance—narrative timelines, plotting and believable characters with motivations—disappeared in a movement, as Alain Robbe-Grillet described it, away from “the old myths of depth” to “a flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself.”⁵

As the 1950s progressed, a new generation of thinkers was emerging in France. Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus still dominated the scene in the aftermath of the Second World War, but they would soon be challenged by a different way of looking at the world. In 1953, the literary critic Roland Barthes published Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero), which saw authentic writing as a constant battle against the stultifying effects of literary conventions. As Lévi-Strauss had already tried to demonstrate in the entirely different contexts of kinship and indigenous culture, in later books Barthes would go on to argue that absolute creativity was an illusion, writing being a game played out within the confines of the literary system. In 1954, the philosopher Michel Foucault was at Uppsala University in Sweden, scouring the Carolina Rediviva library’s massive collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical texts for references as he began writing his thesis. His research would eventually result in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (later published in abridged form in English as Madness and Civilization), an epic study of the relationship between madness and reason through the ages. Foucault saw history less as a series of events than as a set of configurations, which would periodically rupture and metamorphose; madness became an arbitrary concept, drawing meaning only in relation to the shifting social mores of mainstream society. At the same time, Jacques Lacan was developing his heretical psychoanalytic work, reviving Freud through the prism of linguistics. The unconscious, Lacan argued, was “structured like a language.”⁶ As the self fragmented into chains of signifiers, Lacan continued his journey into the denser, more convoluted realms of the structuralist project.

Even history, a discipline that Lévi-Strauss had defined himself against, was moving in a more structuralist direction. Pioneered by the Annales school then headed by Fernand Braudel, Lévi-Strauss’s former colleague at the University of São Paulo, the new history had stretched time out along “the calm, monotonous highways of the longue durée.” Like a nouveau roman, incident and personality were eliminated; in their place were century-long trends: the rise and fall of food prices, glacial movements of population or gradual geopolitical realignment. Braudel wrote of “unconscious history,” operating below the threshold of everyday experience at an imperceptibly slow pace. Constraints—of climate, geography, culture, mentality—could pen mankind into long periods of relative stasis.⁷ This slow petrification fit the cultural mood of the 1950s like a glove. Once again man shrank before epic surroundings, entrapped in systems of which he was unconscious, yet dutifully replicating.

The fingerprints of Lévi-Strauss were all over these diverse projects. At different points, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and Braudel openly acknowledged his impact on their thinking. Yet Lévi-Strauss always kept his distance, playing down any affiliation. In fact, with the exception of Lacan, with whom he remained a close friend (the Lévi-Strausses regularly dined with the Lacans in Paris and would visit their country house in Guitrancourt), he largely eschewed personal or intellectual contacts. Even with Lacan, his friendship was based more on the psychoanalyst’s persona as a wealthy aesthete, art collector and bon vivant than as a theorist. Lévi-Strauss professed on several occasions not to understand Lacan’s ideas. When he attended one of his seminars, he was impressed not so much by the content, but by the style:

What was striking was a kind of radiant influence emanating from both Lacan’s physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans functioning in exotic societies, and I rediscovered there a kind of equivalent of the shaman’s power. I confess that, as far as what I heard went, I didn’t understand. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand . . .⁸

For such an influential thinker, Lévi-Strauss trod a solitary path. “He was a lonely figure intellectually,” Philippe Descola told me. “He cultivated close ties with Roman Jakobson and Georges Dumézil but was otherwise isolated.”⁹ And for someone who was profoundly interested in and moved by art and music, his eventual active disassociation from the avant-garde at midcentury is intriguing. In his academic work, traditional narratives were being broken apart, producing models that could be difficult to relate to the original subject matter. The resulting abstractions teetered between art and science. But the further Lévi-Strauss traveled down this route of methodological abstraction, the less he tolerated analogous experimentation in his own cultural milieu.

1955 WAS LÉVI-STRAUSS’S annus mirabilis. After the success of Tristes Tropiques, he returned to the academic side of his work with another landmark publication, “The Structural Study of Myth,” which appeared in English in the Journal of American Folklore. Like Lévi-Strauss’s article in Word on the application of linguistics to kinship, “The Structural Study of Myth” was a short think piece that laid the groundwork for decades of work. Just as the Word article broke the methodological ground for Les Structures élémentaires, so these twenty-odd pages provided the guiding ideas for Lévi-Strauss’s magisterial Mythologiques quartet. The essay found him at his most radical, demonstrating a method that—although he would never admit it—cannot be dissociated from the prevailing late-modernist moment. It moves from narrative to abstraction, from literature to mathematics, deliberately disrupting a cornerstone of Western culture.

Myth was an area of growing interest for Lévi-Strauss. The telling of rambling stories peopled by strange animals, supernatural forces and the elements appeared to be deeply embedded in the human psyche. Individually, indigenous myths were chaotic, quirky narratives; collectively, common themes resonated. In one sense myths were dreamlike fantasies. In another, distilled through repetition, they became expressions of pure thought. With myth, Lévi-Strauss had an ample canvas on which to explore a subject that had fascinated him since his early contacts with Freud and the surrealists—the interplay between poetic expression and logic.

“The Structural Study of Myth” followed a familiar pattern: the statement of a perennial problem, the ridiculing of centuries of clumsy ad hoc theorizing, followed by a bold abstract solution, modeled on structural linguistics, which shifted the entire theoretical terrain. In the opening pages of the article, Lévi-Strauss briskly dispatched previous explanations. Notions that myths were metaphorical religions, collective dreams, reflections of actual social relations or fumbling protoscientific explanations reduced mythology to “idle play or a crude kind of philosophical speculation,” doomed to end up as “platitude and sophism.”¹⁰ The core problem of past approaches was the attempt to read off sociological truths directly from the substance of a given myth. Once again, Lévi-Strauss drew the parallel to linguistics and its ill-fated attempts to pin certain sounds down to specific meanings—liquids to water, open vowels to large objects, and so forth. Only when words were detached from referents and language began being modeled as a formal system could real progress be made.

Following Saussure, Lévi-Strauss proposed breaking down mythic narratives into their constituent parts. These elements, which he coined “mythemes,” were typically short summaries of narrative events (such as “sibling incest” or “brother and sister sacrificed”) or characteristics of protagonists or things (“amorous” or “barren,” “raw” or “cooked”). Once broken down into “mythemes,” the analyst could order them into thematic columns, looking not just at discrete relationships between elements, but—again using a concept drawn from structural linguistics—“bundles of relations” (paquets de relations). Lévi-Strauss preempted criticism by stressing that he was applying linguistic theory to myth by way of analogy rather than direct correspondence. Myths, after all, were themselves made up of language; “mythemes,” as short phrases, could not be analyzed in the same way as phonemes, mere fractions of words. Nevertheless, the carryover of ideas and concepts into a totally new field remained as ambitious and risky as ever.

To explain what at first reading seems bafflingly esoteric, Lévi-Strauss resorted to a Borgesian analogy. Alien archaeologists visit the Earth, post-apocalypse, and excavate a huge building, stacked with millions of pieces of paper bound in small, bricklike blocks and covered with ink symbols. They begin a long and painstaking analysis, eventually extrapolating an alphabet and key coordinates. The codes flow one way and one way only, they discover, from left to right and from top to bottom, in a flattened coil that—if stretched out—would form an almost endless string of sequences. But then the aliens come across a subset of papers, printed with sets of ruled horizontal lines plotted with squiggles, dots and arcs, which appear not to follow this iron rule. After trying and failing to decipher them, they realize that one line does not follow on from the next, but that the pieces of code have been stacked one upon the other; relationships, they realize, run up and down the page in a complex of harmony and dissonance.

The orchestral score became a favorite metaphor for Lévi-Strauss. The fact that its gridded staves, rigid time codes and keys could produce swirling, intensely romantic sounds was a paradox that fascinated him. By some mysterious process, logic was converted into emotion. Structurally, the score appealed to Lévi-Strauss’s diagrammatic approach. The stacking up of different yet closely related elements down the score’s page—the parts of the cello, the flute, the timpani and the bassoon, for instance—wending together to form an aesthetic whole, became for Lévi-Strauss a key image for an understanding of how culture was structured.

Read from left to right like a text, as the alien archaeologists had at first tried to do, the score became a juddering series of inversions, repetitions and thematic variations. In an imaginative leap, Lévi-Strauss found that this resonated structurally with the composition of mythic narrative, which abounded in echoing themes, unexpected plot twists and sudden reversals. If one could only read a myth vertically, in the same way as a musician reads a score, he reasoned, lining up the myth’s narrative harmonies and counterpoints, uncovering its leitmotifs, its essence could be revealed.

With a theatrical flourish, Lévi-Strauss chose the central Western myth, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, for his demonstration. Like a Brion Gysin cut-up, Lévi-Strauss spliced the myth into a collage of events and characters. From the fragments, certain themes emerged, which he ordered into a table of four columns. The myth could now be read in two directions. From left to right was the familiar narrative—Oedipus’s drawn-out realization of his horrific past. But Lévi-Strauss was more interested in the scorelike columns, where elements of the story were clustered in contrasting themes. The exercise was eccentric but riveting, the essay up to this point a virtuoso display of intellectual acrobatics and intuitive audacity.

The first column, which included Oedipus marrying his mother and Antigone contravening a ritual taboo by burying her brother, was said to represent an exaggeration of blood relations; the second, which had Oedipus killing his father and Eteocles slaying his brother, expressed an underrating of blood ties. Lévi-Strauss’s explanation of the third and fourth columns, which were headed “Monsters being slain” (Cadmos killing the dragon and Oedipus the Sphinx) and “Lameness” (Oedipus’s swollen feet at birth, his father Laios’s “left-sided” posture) respectively, was more complicated. Difficulty in walking is recurrent in mythology in characters born from the earth, appearing in Pueblo and Kwakiutl myths, explained Lévi-Strauss; monsters are otherworldly. Hence the opposition was between the persistence versus the denial of man’s earthly origins—a line of reasoning that the British anthropologist Edmund Leach later described as “vaguely reminiscent of an argument from Alice through the Looking Glass.”¹¹

In the closing pages Lévi-Strauss drew the strands together. The Oedipus myth was really about the fundamental conflict between the Greek religious theory that man, like plant life, was born of the earth, and the knowledge that humans result from blood relations in the union between a man and a woman. On the surface, Oedipus Rex told a story—the tragedy of a man who unwittingly marries his mother and kills his father—but underneath, at a deep structural level, the myth was a logical configuration—a portrait of the mind as it subconsciously ruminated on intractable social contradictions, in this case between religious belief and worldly realities.

Like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Lévi-Strauss’s project was setting off in an increasingly idiosyncratic direction. How many theorists would have arrived at the same conclusions as his reading of Oedipus, even if they were trying to apply his own structuralist methods? Who, other than Lévi-Strauss, would have made the leap from the slaying of monsters to swollen feet to the earthly origin of man? Or from the binding of Oedipus’s feet at birth to limping in Pueblo and Kwakiutl myths? And yet in his concluding remarks, this essentially interpretive exercise masqueraded as something far more exact, as if Lévi-Strauss was approaching myth as a scientist would a crystal or a gas, divining its behavior through experimentation. The logic of mythic thought, Lévi-Strauss concluded, “was as rigorous as that of modern science”—so rigorous, in fact, that it could be reduced to a single mathematical formula, the “genetic law of myth”: F_x (a) : F_y (b) ~ F_x (b) : F_a-1 (y).¹²

It is difficult to grasp Lévi-Strauss’s own brief explanation of what this formula actually means, or see how it could be systematically applied. It seems, in fact, not to be a formula at all—in the sense of being a prescribed method for consistently achieving a given outcome—but rather a modeling of a narrative structure, using mathematical symbols as shorthand, in this case the “torsion surnuméraire” or “double twist”: a kind of warped version of the simpler A is to B as C is to D (A : B :: C : D) that he had used in his analysis of the avunculate.¹³ But followers of Lévi-Strauss need not have worried about the detail—they would wait ten years before the equation was even mentioned again in the second volume of the Mythologiques series, Du miel aux cendres (From Honey to Ashes). “It was necessary to quote it at least once more as proof of the fact that I have never ceased to be guided by it,” Lévi-Strauss explained, in a curious allusion that has almost religious overtones.¹⁴

If one ignored his overblown claims to scientific rigor, though, the exercise did redefine problems in the field of mythology in an interesting and potentially productive way. Just as with kinship, it gave the analyst a point of purchase in an otherwise mystifyingly random field. In true Lévi-Straussian fashion, complex arguments had an ultimately simplifying effect. The abstract bundling into themes and oppositions meant that small variations in different versions of the same myth could be accounted for within the same overall structure. The search for the earliest or truest version was no longer necessary. Across continents, mythic elements endlessly combined and recombined, like the shuffling of genes down the generations. It was this type of epidemiological approach that Lévi-Strauss would spend much of the rest of his academic life exploring, as he took on myth in bulk, looking at hundreds of mythic variations sourced from across the Americas.

If the structural analysis of a single myth could seem arbitrary, the bulk approach felt far more convincing. Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of four different versions of “La Geste d’Asdiwal” (The Story of Asdiwal), published the following year, took the argument into another dimension. Looking at the variations of a Pacific Northwest Coast Tsimshian myth compiled by Franz Boas, Lévi-Strauss found that the differences were systematic, and were themselves part of a structural logic. When the myth traveled from its source into neighboring cultures, it began to degrade. But at a certain point the myth would flip over, reconfiguring itself into an inverted form. He likened the result to optical projections in a light box. As the aperture is reduced, the image begins to blur until, at a pinpoint, the image clarifies, but is upside down and back to front.¹⁵

In Lévi-Strauss’s mind, myth was almost like a living thing or a physical process. Like a crystal, “a myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse that produced it is exhausted,” Lévi-Strauss wrote.¹⁶ The idea that a poetic realm of jaguars and anteaters, rivers and stars dreamed up by small, low-tech indigenous groups could ape the symmetries found in natural phenomena and mathematical equations caught the imagination of a generation of scholars. This, and the avant-garde vitality of the splice technique, dazzled his contemporaries. Tristes Tropiques had given him a popular base outside the academy, just as the sheer originality of his ideas on myth was consolidating his position within it.

STRUCTURALISM’S GROWING APPEAL was not just intellectual. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas became attractive at a particular political moment, a point of weakness and uncertainty on the French Left. For many progressive intellectuals, postwar France had been a period of political commitment to the French Communist Party and Marxism. Some, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre, had embraced Stalinism, even as reports of the regime’s crimes were filtering out. In the mid-1950s, Lévi-Strauss still felt the need to refer to Marx, going as far as naming him in Tristes Tropiques as one of his key influences. “I rarely broach a new sociological problem,” he wrote, “without first stimulating my thought by rereading a few pages of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte or the Critique of Political Economy.”¹⁷

But by the end of 1956, all this had changed. In March of that year, as the situation in Algeria deteriorated, the French Communist Party voted in favor of sending four hundred thousand troops to quell the dissent, a move that alienated many of its supporters. That June, Nikita Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party was published in full in Le Monde. Khrushchev had accused Stalin of presiding over a reign of terror, involving the threatening and executing of his own party members, such as Comrade Eikhe, a loyal, long-term party member, executed in 1940 after being forced to sign a confession under torture. On top of these revelations, November saw the crushing of the Hungarian uprising. As Soviet tanks streamed through the streets of Budapest, the left-wing Western intelligentsia was thrown into crisis. Although the French Communist Party would remain a potent political force, its credibility had sunk. Intellectuals fled the party as up-and-coming thinkers went in search of a new paradigm. It was “a kind of ceremonious massacre,” remembered sociologist René Lourau, then twenty-three years old. “This made possible a clean sweep, a big breath of fresh air, a hygienic act.”¹⁸

Lévi-Straussian structuralism rushed into the ensuing ideological vacuum—except that structuralism, as a detached, abstract science of culture, was itself a kind of vacuum. And that was precisely its appeal. Sloughing off the baggage of postwar politics, Lévi-Strauss offered a way out. Suddenly, arcane analyses of tiny South American tribes began to look attractive, even inspired. The new paradigm “let us stop being forced to hope for anything,” as Michel Foucault later recalled.¹⁹

The fallout from the Left, and the impact of Tristes Tropiques, produced the next generation of anthropologists, as young, disaffected scholars were drawn into the orbit of Lévi-Strauss’s developing program. Communist philosophers Alfred Adler, Michel Cartry, Pierre Clastres and Lucien Sebag quit the PCF in 1956 and began attending Lévi-Strauss’s seminar courses at the Sixth Section. Before long, Sebag and Clastres were doing fieldwork in the Americas, while Adler and Cartry headed for Africa. Another key figure in the development of structural anthropology, Françoise Héritier, who would end up as Lévi-Strauss’s successor at the Collège, made the move from history to anthropology, doing fieldwork in Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), along with her future husband and collaborator, Michel Izard.

For the new converts, tracking the evolution of Lévi-Strauss’s thought was not an easy task. Given his peripatetic early career, articles were now spread out through Brazilian, U.S., British, Dutch and French anthropological, sociological and linguistic journals, some available only in English. Feeling that these threads were now coming together into a coherent statement, Lévi-Strauss had already tried to draw them into an anthology, approaching the writer Brice Parain, who was then commissioning for France’s leading publisher, Gallimard, with the idea. He was turned down on the grounds that his thought “hadn’t matured.”²⁰ Parain would live to regret his decision. (He would later compound his mistake by rejecting another seminal thinker’s early work—Michel Foucault’s Histoire de la folie.) After the success of Tristes Tropiques at Plon, Lévi-Strauss had become hot publishing property, and Gaston Gallimard himself, founder of the publishing house, was called in to woo him. But the charm offensive was to no avail—Lévi-Strauss would remain loyal to Plon for the rest of his writing career.²¹

The resulting Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology) (1958) brought together Lévi-Strauss’s canon in one place for the first time. The classics were placed side by side, from Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking early paper on kinship and linguistics to his essays on shamanism and psychoanalysis. There were the more recent explorations of myth and some earlier curiosities such as “The Serpent with Fish inside His Body,” a short paper he had given in Paris at the end of the war, which drew parallels between an Andean myth and motifs on Nazca and Pacasmayo vases. At the last moment, Lévi-Strauss added in two postscripts to settle scores with his critics: Gurvitch and Rodinson, along with Jean-François Revel, who had recently published an attack on Lévi-Strauss in Pourquoi des philosophes? (What Are Philosophers For?).²²

The dedication, strangely enough, was to Émile Durkheim, whose work Lévi-Strauss had repudiated in his youth as conservative and socially prescriptive; 1958 was the centenary of Durkheim’s birth, and Lévi-Strauss paid homage as “an inconstant disciple” to the man who had fashioned the tools of modern anthropology. “There was something brilliant in the thought of Durkheim,” he said later. “It was beautifully constructed, monumental.”²³

EARLIER IN HIS CAREER, it might have seemed as if Lévi-Strauss had suffered from bad timing. After Brazil, the war had disrupted his progress through the French academic system. On his return to France he had missed the postwar boat, repeatedly blocked by conservatives in the Collège de France. But in the final years of the 1950s, everything clicked. With Anthropologie structurale, Lévi-Strauss had loaded the more accessible Tristes Tropiques with the intellectual ballast he had patiently stored up through his academic career. His first forays into the world of indigenous mythology presaged a whole new body of innovative, challenging work.

Lévi-Strauss was finding his feet on the eve of the most radical theoretical and institutional upheaval in the humanities in postwar France. A massive expansion of higher education was already under way. The number of students gaining the baccalaureate rose sevenfold from the 1930s to the 1960s. As students poured into the university system, research boomed. In 1955, there had been just twenty social science research centers in France; by the mid-1960s, there would be more than three hundred.²⁴ The period of the trente glorieuses—three decades of unprecedented economic growth in France, spanning from 1945 to 1975—was reshaping the country, ushering in a more modern, technocratic ethos. In the shake-up, old-style scholarship would lose ground to sharper, more quantifiable methods. In the humanities this meant sociology and the new history’s statistical approaches, along with abstract model-building in linguistics and psychoanalysis. In this new environment, Lévi-Strauss’s stock was rising fast.

By the end of 1958, Lévi-Strauss was receiving the backing of Merleau-Ponty, a key bridging figure who was trying to reconcile the formal schemes of structuralism and phenomenology’s excavations of the self. Merleau-Ponty had succeeded in creating the first chair in anthropology at the Collège de France²⁵—a position designed specifically for Lévi-Strauss. The following year, Lévi-Strauss was put forward as a candidate while Merleau-Ponty aggressively lobbied fellow members of the Collège, trying to placate the more conservative wing. “Not only did he present it [Lévi-Strauss’s candidacy], he devoted three months of his life to it, and he was not to live much longer,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, who in gratitude kept a photo of Merleau-Ponty on his desk.²⁶ Again there was some opposition, but thanks to Merleau-Ponty’s support, Lévi-Strauss, now fifty, entered the Collège on this, his third attempt, banishing forever what he would later describe as his “awkward past” (passé aussi lourd).²⁷

HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS, delivered in January 1960, opened with an old-fashioned riddle based on “the strange recurrence of the number 8, already well known from the arithmetic of Pythagoras, the periodic table of chemical elements and the law of symmetry of the medusa jelly fish.” To these were added a series of dates: in 1858 the “engineers of social anthropology,” Durkheim and Boas, were born; 1908 saw the creation of the world’s first university chair for social anthropology, given to Sir James Frazer at the University of Liverpool; and in 1958, the Collège had finally created one in France. Lévi-Strauss, of course, had also been born in 1908—as had Merleau-Ponty, who was sitting in the audience and was apparently unhappy to be reminded of his age.²⁸

Lévi-Strauss went on to place his work in the context of the greats, referencing, among many others, Saussure, Freud, Marx, Montesquieu, Spencer, Cuvier, Goethe, along with the usual roll call of anthropologists—Boas, Durkheim, Frazer, Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown, even Malinowski. He lingered over Mauss and his development of the almost mystical notion of the “total social fact”—“a foliated conception . . . composed of a multitude of distinct and yet joined planes . . . where body, soul, society, everything merges.”²⁹

While outlining his ideas on kinship and myth, he made his peace with history. The two met in slow motion. With the longue durée, history had almost come to a standstill. In a gesture of conciliation, Lévi-Strauss gave his crystalline structures minimal animation. “Structure itself occurs in a process of development . . . ,” he said, citing Durkheim. “It is ceaselessly forming and breaking down; it is life which has reached a certain degree of consolidation ...”³⁰

He ended on a wistful note, lamenting the fact that the chair had not been created hundreds of years earlier, when Jean de Léry and André Thevet were writing about the Tupi, still padding barefoot through the forests and beaches of Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay. (He later told Didier Eribon that this was also an allusion to the fact that he had been denied a chair a decade earlier.) “Men and women who, as I speak, thousands of miles from here, on some savannah ravaged by brush fire or in some forest dripping with rain,” he wound up, “are returning to camp to share a meagre pittance and evoke their gods together.” It was to these ragged groups, on the brink of extinction, that Lévi-Strauss as “their pupil, and their witness” dedicated his chair.³¹

He had entered a rarefied world of tradition and protocol. Merleau-Ponty eased him through the first rituals, providing a floor plan of the chamber where the professors met and reserving the chair next to him so that Lévi-Strauss was spared the embarrassment of sitting in someone else’s place. But beyond the old-world ceremonials lay great opportunities in an elite institution devoted solely to the cultivation of the mind. As the 1960s dawned, Lévi-Strauss’s only official duties were to present original courses every year, with the expectation (backed by resources) that he set would up his own research center.

His dominance in the 1960s and early ’70s would rest not just on his originality and intellectual charisma, but on something far more prosaic—his skills as an institution builder at a time when the French academic system was opening up. As a student he had run a left-wing study group before becoming the personal secretary of the socialist député Georges Monnet. In New York he had been head of the École libre and cultural attaché at the French embassy. Back in Paris he was assistant director of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme and secretary-general of UNESCO’s International Social Science Council. Once elected to the Collège, he set about building up his own institutional empire.

Its beginnings were humble. Lévi-Strauss’s research center, the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, was initially housed in a building attached to the Musée Guimet in the sixteenth arrondissement on avenue d’Iéna, not far from the Musée de l’Homme. Inside the main building, thousand-year-old Indian, Cambodian and Japanese Buddha heads were on display, the fruits of the nineteenth-century Lyonnais industrialist Émile Guimet’s collecting expeditions to India and the Far East. The serenity of the gallery space was far from the realities of Lévi-Strauss’s ramshackle offices—the remains of an en suite bathroom that he shared with Jean Pouillon. “Pieces of pipe still stuck out of the walls, which were covered with ceramic tile,” remembered Lévi-Strauss, “and I had what was left of the bathtub drain under my feet.”³²

An adjoining room was piled high with the Human Relations Area Files—a vast paper database covering hundreds of cultures that UNESCO had secured for France, produced by a conglomeration of U.S. universities. The files, which cross-indexed individual cultural features such as methods of food preservation (dried, smoked, pickled, and so forth), aspects of religious systems and kin terms, was a structuralist storehouse, perfect for Lévi-Strauss’s style of work, saving hours of library research. With their emphasis on North America, the Area Files would be crucial as he began looking at the western hemisphere more and more as a single cultural block.³³ So bulky was the accumulation of files that there were fears that the floor would give way under them. Isac Chiva, a pioneer of French rural ethnography who would work closely with Lévi-Strauss as his deputy director at the Laboratoire, remembered their astonishment when Susan Sontag described their cramped rooms as “a large and richly endowed research institute” in her review of Tristes Tropiques for the New York Review of Books in the early 1960s.³⁴

It was in these less than ideal surroundings that Lévi-Strauss met the then up-and-coming literary theorist Roland Barthes, who was looking for a supervisor for his thesis on fashion. Barthes later remembered being received by Lévi-Strauss on the landing on a pair of worn-out lawn chairs while his friend, the semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas, waited anxiously in a café around the corner. Barthes returned to the café deflated—Lévi-Strauss had turned him down. The meeting, however, would turn out to be influential. During their talk, Lévi-Strauss suggested that Barthes read Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, which was first published in the 1920s but had recently appeared for the first time in English translation. The book’s proto-structuralist analysis of folktales would go on to have a major impact on the development of Barthes’s ideas on “narrativity.”³⁵

Despite early similarities between their work, Lévi-Strauss grew progressively more skeptical of Barthes’s project. “I never felt close to him,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled, “and my feelings were confirmed later by the direction that his ideas took.” In the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss was asked to write a preface to Barthes’s book S/Z, a structuralist analysis of “Sarrasine,” a short story by Balzac. When Barthes sent Lévi-Strauss a copy of the book, Lévi-Strauss replied with a short parody of the structuralist method, including male/female oppositions, a kin diagram and the conclusion that two characters in the short story, Filippo and Marianina, were in an incestuous relationship. Even though it was written as a joke, Barthes apparently took the analysis seriously, describing it as “stunningly convincing.”³⁶

The letter revealed a mischievous side to Lévi-Strauss, which undercut his reputation as a cold, analytical thinker. Toward the end of her life, Margaret Mead told anthropologist Scott Atran that although Lévi-Strauss appeared “aloof and frail,” “he’s more playful than he lets on and he’ll outlive me by thirty years if a day.”³⁷ (In the event, Lévi-Strauss survived Mead by thirty-one years.) But his practical jokes were not always shared by their intended targets. In the mid-1950s, André Breton was trying to develop a project on magic. He sent out questionnaires, which involved ranking pictures as more or less magical, to his friends, including Lévi-Strauss. By this stage skeptical of Breton’s dilettantish interest in what he considered a serious anthropological subject, Lévi-Strauss ignored the questionnaire. When Breton sent it again, Lévi-Strauss gave it to his seven-year-old son, Laurent, to complete. Breton was furious, firing off a wounded letter to Lévi-Strauss and later sending him a copy of the resulting book, L’Art magique, with a brusque dedication to Laurent.³⁸

HIS REPUTATION NOW ESTABLISHED, Lévi-Strauss was also benefiting from a quantum leap in the exposure of intellectual figures to the French public—the advent of arts programming on television. Lectures pour tous began broadcasting in March 1953. It ran on prime-time television, going on at nine thirty at night, on what was then the only station on air. Austere, studio-based interviews featured both well-established and up-and-coming thinkers, including the philosophers Gaston Bachelard and Raymond Aron, the philosophical historian Michel Foucault and the writer Albert Camus, as well as Lévi-Strauss himself. For the first time the broader public could actually see these people—from Bachelard’s flowing beard and straggly white hair to Foucault’s more severe balding pate—and construct a living image to fuse with the ideas.

In 1959 Lévi-Strauss was interviewed by Pierre Dumayet, discussing the book Soleil Hopi, for which he had contributed a preface.³⁹ Originally published by Yale University Institute of Human Relations in 1942 as Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, the book became one of the early editions in Plon’s Terre humaine series. It followed the life of Don Talayesva, who had told his story to a Yale anthropologist for thirty-five cents an hour. Seated in a dark studio against the backdrop of what appears to be a semiabstract mural of billowing clouds, stars and serpents, Lévi-Strauss responded with efficiency to interviewer Dumayet’s questions, situating Talayesva’s account with overviews of the Hopi, their history and their contemporary problems. He came across as a highly literate technician. In a curious way this worked, as his relative formality played off against the exoticism of his subject matter.

Later that year, Lévi-Strauss gave a series of radio interviews to producer Georges Charbonnier, which were broadcast on Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (RTF) in the autumn.⁴⁰ In a new departure for Lévi-Strauss, the discussion broadened out from anthropology to contemporary culture, including some revealing discussions about modern art and music. As a young man Lévi-Strauss had been fascinated by the developing strands of modernism. But by now he was middle-aged, and disillusionment with modern art was setting in. For Lévi-Strauss, the great ruptures that had thrilled him in his youth had led nowhere. The path to abstraction had become a story of failure as modern art degenerated into a series of follies and empty aesthetic gestures.

In the Charbonnier interviews he sketched out how he saw this process unfolding. The first truly modern movement, impressionism, was an attempt to push past the studied, academicized representation of an object—the rule-bound conventions of the past—and represent reality “in the raw.” For this it scaled back ambition, retreating from the grand, wide-angled landscapes to the more intimate portraits of rural and urban life—the haystacks, railway bridges and parks. But it was an essentially “reactionary revolution,” “superficial and only skin-deep”—and it was merely trying to refine techniques of representation.⁴¹ Cubism had provided the radical break. Cubist artists were genuinely revolutionary in their rediscovery of nonrepresentational aesthetic meaning—the patchwork of sensual and conceptual associations that hung around a given object.

Art critic Robert Hughes has said that cubism was based on the idea that “reality is not figure and void, it is all relationships, a twinkling field of interrelated events.”⁴² The statement has a structuralist flavor, and the fact that artists like Picasso had drawn inspiration from indigenous artifacts hinted at possible affinities. But as his thought developed, Lévi-Strauss became more and more skeptical of the movement. Whereas “primitive” art was a collective enterprise, embedded in the societies in which it was produced and fused with their ritual and religious lives, cubism was a contrived escape into an individualized aesthetic world. While artists like Picasso self-consciously juggled different styles, producing pastiches of previous ideas as they went, others were retreating into arid abstraction. The outlook was bleak. Across the arts, the West had reached an impasse. The fact that people were “deliberately and systematically trying to invent new forms . . . is precisely the sign of a state of crisis,” Lévi-Strauss concluded. It was possible that the West was even entering an apictorial age in which art would disappear altogether.⁴³

This was not to say that Lévi-Strauss believed that abstraction per se was always bad. A Mongolian shaman who daubed the walls of a sick person’s house with a mural of semiabstract images representing various episodes from his dreams was an example of aesthetic creation of the highest order. But at the same time modern artists’ attempts to return to this unself-conscious expression through experimentation were somehow reprehensible. “We have become divorced from abstract thought,” he lamented. “This schism is light years away from the world of our so-called primitives for whom each color, each texture, each fragrance, each flavour is meaningful.”⁴⁴

Lévi-Strauss’s own work straddled these contradictions. His criticisms of modern art were eerily similar to the attacks made against his own work—that it was too abstract, that it had become divorced from its context, that it was no more than self-absorbed aesthetic play. His attempts to model “primitive” culture verged on the self-conscious abstraction that he derided in modernism. Primitivism and Wagnerian romanticism, avant-garde cut-and-paste and preimpressionist landscape painters, classical illusions and modern linguistics—Lévi-Strauss mixed a fogeyish sentimentalism with an avant-garde sensibility. His personal aesthetic preferences, revealed during the Charbonnier interviews—Florentine Renaissance art, Poussin’s epic landscapes, the romantic seaport images of the eighteenth-century French artist Joseph Vernet—were a sedately conservative list from such an experimental theorist and writer. When pressed, he evoked nature as his ultimate source of inspiration: “What made me a structuralist was less a viewing of the work of Picasso, Braque, Léger, or Kandinsky, than the sight of stones, flowers, butterflies or birds.”⁴⁵

The Charbonnier interviews also featured what would become one of Lévi-Strauss’s best-remembered ideas—the distinction between “hot” and “cold” societies. In a long discussion, he described the differences between tribal and modern European societies.⁴⁶ “Primitive” societies lived at a figurative absolute zero. Rituals, kin structures and economies were set on rotations, like the tiny cogs inside a clock, their cultures existing on an eternal loop. “Hot” societies, by contrast, worked on the principle of the steam engine. Powered by “thermodynamic” differentials—between masters and slaves, lords and serfs, or the rich and the poor—they surged forward, spewing out energy. Against the gentle ticktock of tribal life, Lévi-Strauss’s boiler room of modernity was continuously stoked up. The West was like a runaway train hurtling through billowing steam down the tracks of history.

The image was vivid and simple, illustrating an idea, drawn from cybernetic theory, that Lévi-Strauss had first aired at the close of Tristes Tropiques, when he had mourned the West’s built-in drive to entropy, with its propensity to break down delicate cultures and exhaust the world’s environment in its wake. Though presented with various caveats (for example, elements of the “hot” and the “cold” are inherent in all societies), it opened him up to the criticism that he was reifying primitive cultures, preserving them in an eternal freeze-frame of tradition—societies that, in many instances, were in fact undergoing drastic changes wrought by contact with the West. For Lévi-Strauss, this was missing the point. Of course all societies were undergoing change. It was their attitude to this fact that was the difference. While “primitive” societies denied or downplayed history’s importance “with a dexterity we underestimate,” the West focused compulsively on it.⁴⁷ (In a late interview he even suggested that the process was now reversing—primitive societies on fast-changing frontiers were “warming up,” while France, with its focus on preserving its patrimony and returning to its roots, was cooling.)⁴⁸ Nevertheless, Lévi-Strauss’s binary outlook, with the images of the steam engine and the clock, the primitive and the modern, “us” and “them,” was reinforced, even as he insisted on the fundamental unity of humanity. It was a tension that would run through all his work as he tried to square the relativist and universalist wings of his thought.

Modernism and classicism, primitive and Western culture, science and art—these were the never fully resolved polarities of Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Roman Jakobson had been comfortable with the affiliation between modernism and structuralist analysis, but Lévi-Strauss could never admit the obvious parallels. In his own assessments he was forthright, even extreme, in his preferences for primitive culture, Western classicism and contemporary science. But reading his oeuvre, the distinctions are never as clear. Perhaps Vincent Debaene, one of the editors of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss’s work, published on the eve of his hundredth birthday, was closest to the mark with the comment that Lévi-Strauss worked by marrying “formal classicism with methodological modernism.”⁴⁹ And it was this odd combination that made his voice so distinctive, his ideas so unexpected. As he relaxed into his new life at the Collège, freed from the career anxieties that had dogged him since his return to Paris, these complexities blossomed into some of his most challenging and original work.