9

“Mind in the Wild”

Ideas form a complete system within us, comparable to one of the natural kingdoms, a sort of bloom whose iconography will be traced by a man of genius who will pass perhaps as mad.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC¹

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AT THE END OF the First World War, the American anthropologist Ralph Linton was mobilized. He served in the exhausted battlefields of Champagne and Argonne in the 42nd Division during the final months of the Great War. While on duty, Linton noticed something that he had often read about in the ethnographies he had studied while doing his PhD thesis at Columbia University. As the fighting progressed, men began forging an almost spiritual identity with their division. They called it Rainbow because it was made up of units from twenty-six different states, with a spectrum of regimental colors. When they were asked to which division they belonged, they would answer, “I am a Rainbow.” Rainbows became good omens—some soldiers actually claimed they saw them streaming across the sky every time they went into battle. They regarded themselves as special and distinct from other soldiers, so much so that when stationed near the 77th or Statue of Liberty division, they sewed the symbol of a rainbow onto their uniforms. By the end of the war many divisions had evolved in similar ways, wedding themselves to a symbol and imbuing it with spiritual significance, using it to mark themselves off from other groups. He concluded that something akin to tribal totemism was happening spontaneously on the battlefields of Europe.²

Linton’s example, which Lévi-Strauss cited at the beginning of Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (Totemism), simplified what was in reality a hugely complex area of practice and belief. In the popular imagination, totems were seen as ritual emblems of indigenous groups—the hawk totem representing the hawk clan, for instance, just as the rainbow had stood symbolically for the 42nd Division. For most people, the phenomenon’s most visible manifestations were the so-called totem poles—the magnificently carved cedar posts from North America that graced museums around the world.

Under serious ethnographic scrutiny, though, the concept became far more nuanced. Not only were totem poles misnomers (their purpose was, in fact, extremely varied—sometimes they were carved to represent myths, sometimes to commemorate important events or even to shame a person or group), but real totems, and the beliefs associated with them, were bewilderingly complex. Totems could be could be bears, kangaroos, eagle-hawks, great rivers or mountains; but they could also be mosquitoes, oysters, shooting stars, bits of rope or even the act of laughing or vomiting. They were often linked to origin myths and ancestor cults and associated with food and marriage taboos, but as anthropologists had discovered there was no set pattern. Among the Tikopia, in the Solomon Islands, for instance, the eel was subject to such a strong taboo that even seeing it could induce vomiting; but another totem, the dolphin, would be carved up, cooked and shared out between clans if found stranded on the beach.³ Examples like this proliferated through the ethnographic record in an array of apparently random attitudes and rules.

Just as with kinship and myth, totemism offered up an irresistible riddle for Lévi-Strauss. Regulations governing totems appeared to follow no clear logic. In a similar way to kinship and myth, there seemed to be a mismatch between the poetic efforts that went into the creation of these elaborate schemes and the unimaginative anthropological theories that purported to explain them. In the nineteenth century, totemism had been dismissed as superstition, a kind of primitive forerunner to true religion; in the twentieth, the functionalist school had tried to rationalize it, arguing that it fostered social cohesion or protected valuable animals or plants. Lévi-Strauss’s approach would be typically abstract, delving once more into the inner logic of primitive thought.

The genesis of his interest in totemism had come from his intellectual mentor Georges Dumézil, who commissioned a short book on the subject for Presses universitaires de France’s Myths and Religion series. The series was aimed at introducing specialist research to a broader audience; Lévi-Strauss’s brief, to discuss a controversial issue in extended essay form, using a minimum of footnotes and a pared-down bibliography. Relying on the method he had begun using in the 1940s, Lévi-Strauss planned to use his first round of the seminars at the Collège as a dry run for the text, thinking aloud before refining his thoughts into the book.

Halfway through the academic year, though, he had already raced ahead of himself. An examination of totemic beliefs had become a spring-board for a flood of philosophical ideas. He had moved from a patient assessment of the anthropological literature to forbiddingly abstract course titles, such as The Science of the Concrete and Categories, Elements, Species, Names. He wrote to Dumézil and asked for the commission to be extended into two volumes. Although taken aback, Dumézil agreed, on the condition that they include discreet references to totemism in the titles. On Lévi-Strauss’s original manuscript for what would become Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, he wrote down a few suggestions: “I. Le Totémisme aujourd’hui (ou bien) La Fin du totémisme. II. Derrière le totémisme (ou bien) Au-delà du totémisme” [I. Totemism Today (or possibly) The End of Totemism. II. Behind Totemism (or possibly) Beyond Totemism.]⁴ In the end, Lévi-Strauss stuck to the original one-book commission, and the second volume took on a life of its own. Published separately by Plon, it became one of his most famous works: La Pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind ).

The two books were intimately connected. At just over 150 pages of large type, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui is like a novella against the meatier La Pensée sauvage. The first book was a conceptual clearing of the way, a synthetic sifting through of previous anthropological theories; in the second Lévi-Strauss broke free with an explosion of new ideas. He has described Le Totémisme aujourd’hui as “a kind of historical and critical introduction” to La Pensée sauvage, and the two books—taken together—as a prelude to the Mythologiques quartet. Collectively they were “a break between two bursts of effort” as he drew breath between his earlier exploration of kinship systems and his later work on myth.⁵

In 2007, Lévi-Strauss told anthropologist Frédéric Keck that he had written Le Totémisme aujourd’hui “in a state of haste, precipitation, almost remorse.”⁶ Yet in tone, this is one of his calmest books. There is an above-the-fray coolness as he goes through the classical theories, discarding some outright, considering others at greater length, lamenting that a select few had touched on features of the system, only to fall at the final intellectual hurdle. His idea was to “retread pace by pace an itinerary which, even if it led nowhere, induces us to look for another route.”⁷ But after a meandering start, the course that Lévi-Strauss retraces is in fact remarkably straight, leading relentlessly on toward the intellect. By the book’s end, the concept of totemism had vanished as abruptly as it had surfaced as an anthropological obsession in the late nineteenth century, dissolved back into the logical properties of the mind. For Lévi-Strauss, what anthropologists had avidly recorded was ultimately a mirage, a figment of their imaginations. “Up until now I had avoided tackling this nest of vipers,” he told Gilles Lapouge of Le Figaro littéraire on the book’s publication. “But sooner or later it was necessary to clean out the temple of ethnology, that is to say, to rid it of the notion of totemism.”⁸

“Totemism is like hysteria . . . ,” Lévi-Strauss opened the book, with characteristic melodrama. The two concepts had emerged in the nineteenth century at roughly the same time, and not by coincidence. For Lévi-Strauss, they had played a similar role as the flip sides of cherished Western values, pitting primitive religion and neurosis against modernity and rationality. The idea of totemism reached its high-water mark in the first decades of the twentieth century with publications like Frazer’s four-volume, twenty-two-hundred-page Totemism and Exogamy, which saw totemism as a superstitious protoreligion, and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, an attempt to equate “primitive” peoples’ totemic beliefs to those of neurotics. By 1920, French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s L’État actuel du problème totémique (The Current State of the Totemic Problem) listed more than forty different theories of the phenomenon. And then the concept had gone into retreat. Unwieldy, difficult to define, totemism was subsequently “emptied of substance,” “disincarnated,” “liquidated.”⁹ Over the next decades it barely rated a mention in the leading anthropological textbooks. Like hysteria’s cluster of neuroses and tics, assorted attitudes toward wallabies, bears, crabs or gusts of wind could no longer be nailed down to a single idea. Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by this process, as well as by the long tail of modern anthropologists who had returned to the different elements that had originally gone into the concept and tried to make sense of them.

The ethnographic record was vivid, especially among Australian Aborigines. Lévi-Strauss devoted a chapter to the work of A. P. Elkin, an Anglican priest and Australia’s first professor of anthropology. At the end of the 1920s, Elkin had spent a year studying a variety of Aboriginal groups, traveling by lorry, packhorse, mule and motorboat from Broome up to the Drysdale River, through the Kimberley region in the north of Western Australia. This fieldwork, combined with library research on other regions, exposed Elkin to a huge variety of totemic beliefs and practices. He found that totems could be attached to every conceivable grouping—the moiety, subsection, clan and so on—as well as to dreams, to cults, to gender, to ancestor worship. Individuals could have their own personal totems and several further group totems. In northeastern South Australia, each person had matrilineal “flesh” totems, patrilineal “cult” totems, a dream totem and secret knowledge of his mother’s brother’s patrilineal cult totem. Among the Southern Aranda (central Australia) there were more than four hundred totems grouped into sixty different categories. While riveted by the detail that Elkin had managed to compile, Lévi-Strauss was disappointed by his conclusions. When Elkin tried to synthesize his findings, he was left with two rather vague ideas: totems expressed cooperation of man with nature, and continuity between past and present. The question that played on Lévi-Strauss’s mind was why these peoples would need such rich intellectual systems to convey such bland propositions.

An intuitive solution proposed by Bronislaw Malinowski was that native peoples ritualized animals and plants to protect them because they were edible or useful to the group in some way. This “functionalist” approach was too neat for Lévi-Strauss, and he flooded the text with counterexamples culled from well-known ethnographies. The waterbuck, monitor lizard, various trees, certain diseases, hide, the red ant, monorchids, papyrus, durra-bird, gourd, rope—the list reads like an exercise in psychoanalytic free association, and yet for the Nuer of East Africa they were all considered totems. At the same time, plants and animals that were central to their diet and economy were treated with complete indifference. In central Australia, mosquitoes, flies and crocodiles commonly appeared as totems, even though they were seen as harmful. The less than convincing functionalist solution to this dilemma had been to say that they were venerated because they brought discomfort to their enemies. Lévi-Strauss was scathing: “In this respect it would be difficult to find anything which, in one way or another, positively or negatively (or even because of its lack of significance?), might not be said to offer an interest.”¹⁰ Endlessly adaptable, functionalist theories explained everything and nothing.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Oxford-educated Baldwin Spencer had teamed up with a stationmaster at the Alice Springs Overland Telegraph Station, Frank Gillen, who had little formal education, but an avid interest in Aboriginal culture and direct experience of their communities. In 1901-2 the pair mounted a major expedition across the desert plains of central Australia. They documented groups that had had only sporadic contact with Europeans, and produced some of the earliest film footage of native Australians—haunting black-and-white images of clay-daubed men performing ritual dances with bunches of dry foliage tied around their ankles, rhythmically pounding the desert sands.

Spencer and Gillen had come up with a different solution to the problem of “negative” totems. They had argued that Aborigines ritualized flies and mosquitoes and willed them to multiply because they were associated with periods of heavy rain. The idea had a functionalist flavor, but nevertheless reframed the argument in a suggestive way. The flies and mosquitoes had been transformed from “stimuli” to “signs,” from natural objects to symbols. It was this more conceptual view of totemism that interested Lévi-Strauss. He praised a long line of anthropologists, including Raymond Firth and Meyer Fortes, who had looked at totemic complexes not in utilitarian terms, but as symbolic representations of human relations.¹¹ But again, this seemed too tidy. For Lévi-Strauss, the question that returned “like a Leitmotiv” whenever totemic systems were discussed was why specific animals or plants were chosen above others. Why the hawk rather than the eagle, the cassowary and not the emu, the wallaby rather than the kangaroo?

Once more he found his solution in the realm of logical abstraction. The choice of totems had nothing to do with utility or analogy—it was an expression of pure intellect. By way of an example, Lévi-Strauss returned to Radcliffe-Brown: not his earlier functionalist theories, but a lecture he had given in 1951, four years before his death. Looking cross-culturally, Radcliffe-Brown had noticed that totems relating to moieties were generally two species, often birds. In British Columbia opposing moieties were named eagle and raven. For certain Australian groups of the Darling River, it was the eagle-hawk and the crow; the white cockatoo and crow were used in Western Australia, and the white cockatoo and black cockatoo in Victoria. In eastern Australia, the bat and the night owl featured as male and female totems, respectively. The sea-eagle and the fish-hawk were common in Melanesia. Other pairs of animals were also used: two species of kangaroo, two types of bee, the coyote and the wildcat. Looking at the myths associated with these pairs, Radcliffe-Brown concluded that these choices were not so much about the animals themselves as their relationships—each pair expressed a kind of connected duality, a union of the similar, but different. The animals were related yet opposed, their structural pairing echoing the relationships between the moieties they represented, as a kind of yin and yang of indigenous thought.¹²

For Lévi-Strauss, Radcliffe-Brown’s insight was fundamental. His change of emphasis from “animality” to “duality,” as the French philosopher Henri Bergson had put it, lifted him “beyond a simple ethnographic generalisation—to the laws of language, and even of thought.”¹³ Indigenous peoples were involved in a conceptual game, building metaphysical models out of what they had readily at hand. It was not animals’ individual characteristics that interested the native mind, but the way they contrasted, forming a code whose symbols were drawn from nature. On the one hand there are kinship relations; on the other there are relationships between animals and plants. In the system taken as a whole, “it is not the similarities, but the differences that resemble each other,” Lévi-Strauss explained in a formula that somersaults in the mind. As such, totemism did not exist as a separate entity—a protoreligion; a primitive, utilitarian ritual—it was just one aspect of a highly abstract metaphorical style of thought. “Natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to eat’ [bonnes à manger] but because they are ‘good to think’ [bonnes à penser],” Lévi-Strauss concluded with his much-quoted jibe against Malinowski.¹⁴

Le Totémisme aujourd’hui had all the tropes of Lévi-Strauss’s distinctive style. The ethnographic detail wedded to logic, the unexpected shift from classical anthropological theories to linguistic models and, with his whimsical comparison between a passage from Henri Bergson and reflections of a Dakota wise man in the last chapter, the melding of French philosophy and native thought. The book also contained the clearest exposé of structuralism to date, signposted at intervals through the text. In the opening chapter Lévi-Strauss outlined the structuralist method, step by step: “(1) define the phenomenon under study as a relation between two or more terms, real or supposed; (2) construct a table of possible permutations between these terms; (3) take this table as the general object of analysis which, at this level only, can yield necessary connections . . .”¹⁵ In this bald proposition, one can see both the inherent radicalism of the enterprise and its strangely alienated nature. Lévi-Strauss was fascinated by ethnographic minutiae, but only as the raw material for a second-order analysis.

Toward the middle of the book, he made explicit the intellectual step that set him apart from contemporary anthropological thinking, be it the British school of structural functionalism or the then emerging symbolic approaches. What was novel about Lévi-Strauss’s outlook was a conceptual leap from figurative to formal analogy, from an actual to a structural resemblance. Like in his analyses of kinship, Lévi-Strauss was interested in comparing different relationships, not making one-on-one correspondences. A bear totem did not relate directly to a bear-clan; the clansmen were not in some metaphorical sense bearlike, as some anthropologists had argued. But contrasted against, say, a salmon totem of the neighboring clan, it made up one element of a cultural equation: bear is to salmon as bear-clan is to salmon-clan. His ultimate goal was to map out these “similarities between sets of differences,” as he phrased it, using a Saussurian turn of phrase, similarities that could be as oblique, lateral and associative as the abstract art that he had disowned.

Anthropology’s painstaking documenting of cultures was not an end in itself, Lévi-Strauss concluded. Its role was to trace the structural echoes that Lévi-Strauss believed reverberated through thought, cultural output, social relations and even the physical world. In so doing, he wrote as he drew Le Totémisme aujourd’hui to a close, anthropology would fulfill its role as a master discipline, integrating essence and form, method and reality.

WHILE LÉVI-STRAUSS was working on Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, material for La Pensée sauvage was coming together through his seminars at the Collège. The result was almost simultaneous publication. Just two months after Le Totémisme aujourd’hui appeared in March 1962, La Pensée sauvage came out to ecstatic reviews. Claude Roy, writing in Libération, called it “a major event in the history of modern humanism”; for Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the leading journal Esprit, which devoted an entire issue to the book in 1963, two “événements philosophiques” had appeared “back to back” (coup sur coup).¹⁶

The book’s title was a double pun in French—pensée can mean both “thought” and “pansy”; sauvage, both “wild” (in the sense of “untamed”) and “savage.” Sauvage was at once an ironic reference to the derogatory nineteenth-century term for primitive and an allusion to the centuries-old French philosophical tradition typified by Rousseau and Montaigne, to which Lévi-Strauss saw himself as heir. Was there also a more contemporary reference to l’esprit sauvage—a theoretical term that had been used by the late Merleau-Ponty, to whom Lévi-Strauss dedicated the book? Whatever the case, Lévi-Strauss was being deliberately provocative: “I reprised the term ‘savage’ on purpose,” he said in an interview after the book’s publication. “It carries an emotive and critical weight, and I think that one shouldn’t take the vitality out of problems.”¹⁷

Pensée as “pansy” introduced a rustic, poetic touch. There was the idea of natural systems, and perhaps even a coded allusion to Lévi-Strauss’s moment of revelation on the Maginot Line, when as a young conscript he had stopped to contemplate a bunch of dandelions. With pensée in the sense of “thought,” it seemed as if he was joining the age-old philosophical debate on whether there were fundamental differences between “civilized” and “primitive” ways of thinking. For a Parisian intellectual audience in the early 1960s, the book would at first have appeared to be in the spirit of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s earlier studies of la mentalité primitive. But as Lévi-Strauss’s argument unfurled, it became clear that La Pensée sauvage ultimately referred to something far more abstract and universal: not primitive thought, but a kind of untrammeled thinking, the mind running free. Taken together, the words in the title encapsulated all the elements of Lévi-Strauss’s project—nature, culture and the intellect—in one sonorous expression.

In La Pensée sauvage Lévi-Strauss moved on from the simple dualities of Le Totémisme aujourd’hui into a world of extraordinary complexity. At its heart was the idea that “primitive” peoples were driven by the same disinterested intellectual curiosity as their modernized counterparts. Whether in the deserts of central Australia and New Mexico or the forests of the Philippines and West Africa, indigenous groups gathered information systematically, scouring their environments and synthesizing what they found with a logical rigor. In the process, they had built up an encyclopedic knowledge, rich in detail. The Hanunóo from the southern tip of Mindoro Island in the Philippine archipelago named more than four hundred different animals, including sixty classes of saltwater mollusk; New Mexico’s Tewa distinguished more than forty-five types of ground mushroom and ear fungus; while one ethnographer had recorded eight thousand animal and plant terms from a single informant in Gabon. Lévi-Strauss pulled examples from ethnographies from around the world of a knowledge that was poetic in its descriptive precision. The Tewa had forty different ways to describe the shape of a leaf; the Fang of Gabon could express subtle differences between “winds, light and colour, ruffling of water and variation in surf, and the currents of water and air.”¹⁸

The exhaustive classification of plants and animals went far beyond the day-to-day needs of preliterate groups. Rummaging around their environment, “savages” observed, experimented, categorized and theorized, using a kind of free-form science. They combined and recombined natural materials into cultural artifacts—myths, rituals, social systems—like artists improvising with the odds and ends lying around their studio. The central image that Lévi-Strauss used to describe this process was that of the bricoleur—a tinkerer, an improviser working with what was at hand, cobbling together solutions to both practical and aesthetic problems. La Pensée sauvage—free-flowing thought—was a kind of cognitive bricolage that strived for both intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction. It was a very French idea, which brought together the artist and the atelier, the artisan and the dying crafts of a more creative age, an era that Lévi-Strauss experienced at first hand as a boy helping his father cobble together furniture in the living room of the rue Poussin apartment. “My father was a great bricoleur,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled. “It was he that gave me the pleasure and the skill for bricolage.”¹⁹ As intellectual concepts, bricolage and the bricoleur were rich and evocative, and would prove influential in the years to come as a shorthand for a kind of off-the-cuff experimentation used in the visual arts, literature and philosophy.

La Pensée sauvage set out to explore the logic underlying bricolage, delving deeper into the realm of Saussurian linguistics of signs and symbols, binary oppositions and “relationships of differences” that Lévi-Strauss had deployed since listening to Jakobson lecturing in New York in the 1940s. There was now not even any need to invoke a range of plants and animals to build up a logical set of sufficient density. A single species could yield enough differences for the most intricate model. For the Osage (southern Sioux), the eagle is divided into the golden, spotted or bald eagle, by color and even by age. Through the eagle the Sioux were able to create a “three-dimensional matrix,” a quotidian aspect of their environment becoming an “object of thought,” a rich “conceptual tool.”²⁰ Add a bear and a seal, and the permutations rose exponentially. Lévi-Strauss drew up the multiplying possibilities in a diagram that resembled a line drawing of a refracted crystal. “Species” and “individual” appear at the vortices; at its pivots are seal, bear, eagle, head, neck, feet. The intersections are given values: h1, h2, h3; f1, f2, f3; and so forth. The properties of what Lévi-Strauss called the “the totemic operator” were a distillation of structuralist rhetoric:

The whole set thus constitutes a sort of conceptual apparatus which filters unity through multiplicity, multiplicity through unity, diversity through identity, identity through diversity. Endowed with a theoretically unlimited extension on its median level it contracts (or expands) into pure comprehension at its two extreme vortices, but in symmetrically reversed forms, and not without undergoing a sort of torsion.²¹

This was Lévi-Strauss at his most arcane, theoretical discourse at its most French. The model, as complex as it appeared, he went on to explain, represented “only a small portion of a cell,” a “minute fraction” of the possibilities, given the potential numbers of individuals, species and parts of the body that could be analyzed. Modeling such a vast array of logical combinations was a task “reserved for ethnology of the next century,” Lévi-Strauss concluded, which “could not be done without the aid of machines.”

In La Pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss also returned to the Scottish biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, which he had read in the New York Public Library while writing his thesis, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. It was from D’Arcy Thompson that Lévi-Strauss elaborated on one of the keystones of structuralism—the idea of transformations. D’Arcy Thompson had shown that the form and structure of different species were mathematical transformations of each other. By warping a geometric grid, systematically elongating, squashing or tapering forms plotted onto its coordinates, a tapir’s skull could be transformed into a horse’s, a horse’s skull into a rabbit’s into a dog’s. Antelope, rhinoceros and goat horns; teeth, tusks and seashells were but logarithmic transformations of each other.

Again Lévi-Strauss took only the flavor of these insights—the idea of mathematically generated patterns and the logic of form—applying them in his own idiosyncratic way. What he found, looking at the panorama of different ethnographic descriptions, was not so much a gradual evolution or seeping influences from neighboring cultures, but systemic structural change using the same overall symmetries and proportions. “I was soon to notice that this way of seeing was part of a long tradition,” Lévi-Strauss recalled. “Behind Thompson was Goethe’s botany, and behind Goethe, Albrecht Dürer and his Treatise on the Proportions of the Human Body.”²²

 

 

IT MAY SEEM STRANGE that such a dense and technical book could become a landmark in French thought, but the first and last chapters—a stream-of-consciousness theoretical essay and a polemical attack on Jean-Paul Sartre, respectively—brought La Pensée sauvage to life for a broader readership. The first chapter was frenetic. One moment Lévi-Strauss was discussing Hanunóo plant classification, the next he was analyzing the ruff of a lace collar in a portrait of a woman by sixteenth-century French mannerist painter François Clouet and the inherent aesthetic qualities of miniatures. Lévi-Strauss interspersed references to Charles Dickens, the stage sets of silent-era French filmmaker Georges Méliès, Japanese gardens, the Sistine Chapel and cubism with ethnographic descriptions of a dozen different indigenous groups. “Art lies half way between scientific knowledge and mythical and magical thought,” he declared at one point; “the painter is always midway between design and anecdote” at another. It may not always have been easy to follow, but his eclectic approach was compelling.

There was also a hint of the eccentric in La Pensée sauvage. The selection of illustrations ranged from the intriguing to the bizarre. There were Grandville’s nineteenth-century drawings of humans with animal heads, taken from Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828-29), along with Charles Le Brun’s seventeenth-century experimental sketches of crosses between human and animal physiognomy. The former were labeled, “The opposite of totemism: nature humanised,” and the latter, “The opposite of totemism: man naturalised,” though neither plate was discussed or even ever referred to in the text. More conventional were two carved stone churinga, sacred objects used in Aboriginal ancestor cults. But these were coupled with European-style outback landscapes painted by Australian Aborigines, which Lévi-Strauss described as “dull and studied watercolours one might expect of an old maid” and whose only raison d’être seemed to be a single throwaway comment in chapter three.²³

In among the flotsam of Lévi-Strauss’s mind was a philosophical set piece—an extended comparison between scientific and sauvage ways of thinking. Where scientific thought was analytical and abstract, breaking the world down into a series of discrete problems, la pensée sauvage sought a total solution. The scientist measured, weighed and modeled at a remove; the primitive dealt directly in the sensual experiences of his immediate surroundings, balancing them off against each other, ordering them into mytho-poetic formulae. In an interview for a documentary shot in the 1970s, Lévi-Strauss described the process of scientific research as a never-ceasing excavation—the breaking through of the surface reality in search of another analytical world behind, which would in turn yield a further world, and so on. “The progress in science consisted in reaching successive levels of more and more secret maps,” Lévi-Strauss went on, “where explanations were found to the essence of the map we had.” In contrast to this “constant probing, penetration,” la pensée sauvage was all surface and no depth, taking the environment at face value, but nevertheless fashioning its elements into beautifully balanced and rigorously logical objects of the thought.²⁴ With this dichotomy, Lévi-Strauss was approaching the core of his own thinking—an amalgam of the sensual and the logical, which obsessed him throughout his career.

In the field he had jotted down tasting notes from the tropics, from the thirteen different flavors of honey that the Nambikwara gathered, whose aromas he likened to bouquets of burgundy, to appreciations of exotic fruits. The araca had “a turpentine taste with a fizz of faint acidity,” crushed açaí produced a “thick raspberry-flavoured syrup” and the bacuri was “like a pear stolen from the orchards of Paradise.” In the forest he had breathed in the chocolate aromas of decaying leaf litter, which made him think of how soil produces cocoa, and how the gravelly earth of Haute-Provence could beget both the floral scent of lavender and the pungency of truffles. It was there that the expedition team had spent three days cooking and eating, improvising haute cuisine in the depths of the forest, sampling hummingbird roasted on skewers flambé au whiskey and a ragoût of mutum (wild turkey) stewed with palm buds and served with a creamy sauce made from nut pulp au poivre. For all his intellectual austerity, his distrust of direct experience, Lévi-Strauss was alive to the senses.

Instead of fighting these apparent contradictions, he tried to fuse them. In doing so he believed he was solving a venerable philosophical problem: the relationship between abstract intellectual understanding and raw sensory perception, between the “intelligible” and “sensible,” as Plato had framed it, or John Locke’s “primary” and “secondary” qualities. A long line of thinkers, from the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus through to Galileo Galilei, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, had asked whether there was some fundamental distinction between qualities that exist independent of the observer—like geometric shapes, numbers, motion and density—and qualities that are subjective—colors, odors and textures, for instance. The idea of red, bitter or rough seemed fundamentally different from measurable, precisely definable entities like a circle, a square or the number three. While the West had marginalized “secondary qualities” in order to establish science, Lévi-Strauss argued that preliterate groups had transcended this debate, welding the sensual and the logical into a seamless whole.

For Lévi-Strauss, aesthetic sensation was the very currency of la pensée sauvage, but it was applied according to rigorous principles. Though freed to roam at will, untamed thinking had ended up producing a tidy collection of logical propositions, lining up elements in neat oppositions and inversions—fur versus feather, the smooth and the gritty, noise as against silence, fresh as opposed to putrid and so forth—that Lévi-Strauss would map out in a chapter titled “The Fugue of the Five Senses” in his next book, Le Cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked).²⁵ The metaphor was less like the wilds of nature than a Parisian park, with its gravel squares, strips of lawn and rows of topiaried shrubs. His task was to analyze this strange fusion—a logical system built out of pure experience, a grammar of sound, odor and texture, a formal structure made up of perceptions of plants, animals and nature, of bears, seaweed, ants and shooting stars, which he termed “the science of the concrete” (la science du concret). “We have had to wait until the middle of this century for the crossing of long separated paths,” he wrote as he wound up La Pensée sauvage.²⁶ Modern thought was engaging with that of the Neolithic, and human knowledge was at last coming full circle.

 

 

IT TOOK FOUR YEARS for La Pensée sauvage to appear in English translation. Rodney Needham, then still Lévi-Strauss’s champion in Britain, gave the job to Sybil Wolfram, an Oxford University philosophy lecturer in her early thirties. Wolfram began work, but immediately fell out with Lévi-Strauss over criticisms he made of early drafts of the first two chapters. She almost left the project at this point, but the publishers persuaded her to complete the translation. When she handed in the script, Lévi-Strauss was damning: “I could not recognise my book as she had rendered it,” he complained in a letter to the journal Man. For her part, Wolfram disassociated herself from the heavily edited version of her work that finally appeared in print, produced by several translators working under anthropologist Ernest Gellner, which she felt was “full of howlers, pieces of sheer nonsense, ungrammatical sentences, extreme infelicities, pointless substitutions, often resulting in absurdity and inaccuracy, the loss of allusions I have carefully preserved.” Wolfram later joked, paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss, that the editing process had miraculously succeeded in “turning the cooked into the raw.”²⁷

The pairing was clearly no meeting of minds, as excerpts of their correspondence published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Lévi-Strauss’s works reveal. Wolfram accused Lévi-Strauss of having “an inadequate knowledge of English,” calling his suggestion of the word “structuration” a “revolting Americanism.” At one point she sent Lévi-Strauss a long letter explaining the difference between “contingency” and “chance”; at another, she dismissed philosophical terms like être (being) and devenir (becoming) used as substantives as “meaningless metaphysical expressions.” She found Lévi-Strauss’s corrections infuriating. “If you do not mean what I put, then I do not understand what you mean,” she wrote in exasperation.²⁸

The title’s wordplay produced further problems, with a range of possible permutations in English: The Wild Pansy, Untamed Thinking or Lévi-Strauss’s own suggestion, Mind in the Wild. One of the editors proposed the academic-sounding Natural Ideas—A Study in Primitive Thought,²⁹ but the book would be published as The Savage Mind—a distortion of the original—minus the flowers on the front cover and the appendix, in which Lévi-Strauss had placed a series of historical descriptions of wild pansies. (Lévi-Strauss had the last word on the matter in the 2008 Pléiade edition, inserting a quote from Hamlet in English—“and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts”—on the flyleaf.) Still the only version available in English, The Savage Mind does indeed have a clunky feel to it at times, but to be fair to the translators, taking Lévi-Strauss’s punning philosophico-poetic prose into English was never easy, and was made more difficult by running disagreements with the author.

The Wolfram dispute underlines the enduring gulf between Lévi-Strauss and his British counterparts, Latin and Anglo-American intellectual sensibilities. Lévi-Strauss’s elliptical, poetic style was indeed resistant to more literalist Anglo-American interpretations. His repeated use of hard science metaphors goaded critics who found it impossible to pin down the detail of his arguments and were indeed suspicious that his floral prose masked a lack of rigor.

Part of the problem was a lack of sensitivity to the context in which Lévi-Strauss was working. For him, ethnography worked in the service of ideas, a concept that was familiar to his French intellectual audience but which did not travel well across the Channel. In Britain the high-flown prose that came with the territory was seen as too intellectually showy, but even Lévi-Strauss was happy to admit in the last few pages of the book “there is a little rather false lyricism,” though he never felt it discredited his ideas.³⁰

In an interview in the early 1970s for the journal Psychology Today, Lévi-Strauss gave his interpretation of this French/Anglo-American divide:

It happens that in France . . . philosophy makes up a sort of vernacular language that serves as a means of communication between the scientific world, the academic world, and the cultivated public on the one hand, and between different branches of research, on the other. This is not true for England or for the United States. I would even say that the philosophical aspect you point to in my work, which is perhaps attractive to some French readers, is a considerable source of irritation to the English and the Americans.³¹

The ease with which continental scholars moved between art and science was also alien to the more compartmentalized Anglo-American approaches. In the year that La Pensée sauvage was published, for instance, Lévi-Strauss joined forces with Roman Jakobson in a structural analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s short poem “Les Chats.” After much correspondence on the subject, the two men sat down together in Lévi-Strauss’s study and coauthored an essay deconstructing the poem. A playful exercise, perhaps, but one which ended up being published in L’Homme, the house journal of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie, launched by Lévi-Strauss, Émile Benveniste and Pierre Gourou in 1961 as a French equivalent to Man in Britain and American Anthropologist in the United States.³²

While British and American critics often seized on errors of scholarship and interpretation of sources, in France Lévi-Strauss was both attacked and lauded on strictly philosophical grounds. Some of the responses were as dense and theoretical as Lévi-Strauss’s original work. In a debate between Lévi-Strauss and Paul Ricoeur, at that time one of France’s leading philosophers, published in the 1963 Esprit devoted to a critical reading of La Pensée sauvage, Ricoeur told Lévi-Strauss:

You salvage the meaning, but it is the meaning of non-meaning [le sens de non-sens], the admirable syntactical arrangement of a discourse that says nothing. I see you at that conjunction between agnosticism and a hyper-intelligence of syntax. This is what makes you at once fascinating and disturbing.³³

Ricoeur described Lévi-Straussian structuralism as sometimes a “Kantianism without the transcendental subject”—that is to say, a disembodied version of the mental constraints that Kant argued gave shape to our perception of reality—at other times an “absolute formalism.”³⁴ Lévi-Strauss had long fought against the tag “formalism,” which he felt misinterpreted his position. As to “Kantianism without the transcendental subject,” he liked the label, even adopting it in the first book of the Mythologiques quartet, Le Cru et le cuit, where he also cited approvingly another Ricoeur description of structuralism. Adrift from “the thinking subject,” Lévi-Strauss’s “categorising system” was “homologous with nature”—“It may perhaps be nature,” Ricoeur concluded with an air of mysticism.³⁵

By the end of the Esprit encounter, Ricoeur was fascinated by structuralism, but ultimately disillusioned:

I see an extreme form of modern agnosticism. As far as you are concerned there is no “message” . . . you despair of meaning, but you console yourself with the thought that, if men have nothing to say, at least they say it so well that their discourse is amenable to structuralism.³⁶

The vacuum of meaning, the absence of will, the erasure of the “subject”—at that time the focal point of philosophical thinking—these were aspects of structuralism that unsettled some.³⁷ But others, especially a new generation of thinkers who were at the beginning of their intellectual careers, were intrigued. Not only was Lévi-Strauss challenging the assumptions that had underpinned French thought for a generation, but he was proposing their radical opposites. Against the humanist orthodoxy, he was creating an intellectual space where people, himself included, were merely vessels for ideas, transition points of culture. These ideas had been aired to a mixed response through the 1950s. The time was now ripe for an assault on the philosophy of France’s most famous thinker: Jean-Paul Sartre.

A philosopher who wrote of the nausea of being, the struggle for authenticity and personal freedom in a godless world; a very public intellectual whose private life became the stuff of legend; a onetime communist activist who ended up a Maoist sympathizer—it is hard to think of someone more at odds with Lévi-Strauss’s ideas and persona. In public Lévi-Strauss praised Sartre as a great thinker who had “a prodigious capacity to express himself in the most diverse genres: theater, newspapers, philosophy, the novel.”³⁸ Privately, Lévi-Strauss was scandalized by Sartre’s outré lifestyle. While Lévi-Strauss was in America, Sartre’s New York lover Dolorès Vanetti asked him if he liked Sartre. “How do you think I could like him after reading She Came to Stay?” he replied, referring to Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’Invitée, a fictionalized account of her ménage à trois with Sartre and her student Olga Kosakiewicz. “It’s Sartre portrayed in his entirety and he comes over as a vile bastard.” Dolorès duly passed on one of Lévi-Strauss’s rare indiscretions to Sartre himself, who mentioned it in a letter to de Beauvoir. “Thanks a lot, my fine friend, for the portrait,” Sartre added drily.³⁹

In 1960, Sartre published the second of his great philosophical tracts, Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), sections of which had already appeared Les Temps modernes. Written in part as a response to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of his work, it attempted the daunting task of marrying existentialism and Marxism into a coherent whole. On its publication, he sent a copy to Lévi-Strauss with the dedication “To Claude Lévi-Strauss. In testimony of a faithful friendship.” He added that the book’s “main questions were inspired by those which occupied you, and especially by the way you posed them.”⁴⁰ Sartre had cited Lévi-Strauss approvingly several times during the course of Critique de la raison dialectique, including a chapter entitled “Structures—The Work of Lévi-Strauss,” with examples drawn from Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. There were even hints of structuralism’s influence on Sartre, as he edged toward a more restricted, system-dominated view of freedom.

Assisted by Lucien Sebag and Jean Pouillon, Lévi-Strauss devoted his seminar at the École pratique des hautes études to an analysis of Critique de la raison dialectique over the winter of 1960-61, reading and rereading Sartre at the same time as he was writing Le Totémisme aujourd’hui and La Pensée sauvage. To the latter he ended up adding a final, relatively free-floating chapter—“History and Dialectic”—dealing specifically with Sartre’s book. In the preface he described his critique “as a homage of admiration and respect.”⁴¹ But far from returning Sartre’s compliment, Lévi-Strauss’s assessment was brutal.

Densely woven with the jargon of another intellectual age, making some passages virtually incomprehensible to the modern-day nonspecialist reader, Lévi-Strauss attempted to bulldoze Sartre’s entire project in the space of two dozen pages. His lines of attack were diverse: a defense of “analogical” primitive thought styles against Western dialectical reason; an attack on the solipsistic focus on the subject; more assaults on the primacy of history and Sartre’s fundamentally ethnocentric outlook. At base many of the arguments were retreads of points he had already made in Race et histoire and Tristes Tropiques, but by now he had both refined and amplified his attack. His most cutting remarks were couched in anthropological Victoriana: Sartre’s privileging of Western history over that of the Papuans was akin to “a sort of intellectual cannibalism much more revolting to the anthropologist than real cannibalism.” His attempt to oppose the primitive and the civilized was an opposition that “would have been formulated by a Melanesian savage.”⁴² Lévi-Strauss felt he was now working on a far broader canvas than the Marxist/existentialist discourse of historical forces and the possibilities of personal emancipation. For Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, along with much of the Parisian intellectual elite, was engaged in a parochial debate about a few hundred years of Western mores and history. Bus stop queues, strikes, boxing matches—the examples from which Sartre built his “philosophical anthropology”—seemed provincial in comparison to structuralism’s global reach.

Sartre, one of the era’s most combative intellectuals who had often engaged his opponents in very public debate, gave no immediate response. He referred to the piece only several years later, after the structuralist boat had already sailed, lamenting that Lévi-Strauss had misunderstood his ideas and unfairly discredited historical research. Much later Lévi-Strauss would play down the controversy. “It was never much of a feud . . . ,” he told a reporter at the Washington Post. “The Sartre disciples said that nothing can be known without history; I had to dissent. But it is not that I don’t believe in history, I just feel there is no privilege for it.”⁴³

At the time, though, the significance of “History and Dialectic” was immense. There was a palpable sigh of relief in intellectual circles. Finally someone had dared to openly attack the man who had dominated French intellectual life for a quarter of a century. Sartre’s rallying call for authenticity, commitment, acts of pure will in a time of gathering political disillusionment had begun to grate. With one sweeping gesture, Lévi-Strauss’s challenge had broken the spell. To Sartre’s “Hell is other people,” Lévi-Strauss would retort, “Hell is ourselves.” “Man is condemned to be free,” wrote Sartre, but for Lévi-Strauss the whole idea of freedom was illusory.

Although Lévi-Strauss was only three years younger than Sartre, there was a sense that a generational shift was under way, a rupture of both style and substance. Power was passing from a chain-smoking, pill-popping haunter of Left Bank café society to a sixteenth-arrondissement aesthete. Pitted against the image of the grandstanding intellectual was the sober technician, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu recalled in an interview in the 1980s:

It is true that philosophers like Sartre are still admirable and perhaps also important: the person who speaks when no one knows what to say—in times of crisis, etc.—but at the same time we were a bit tired of that kind of discourse, as prophets can also speak in the void, at the wrong time. So someone [that is, Lévi-Strauss] telling us, “See, we can understand, we can analyze, there are conceptual tools to understand things that seemed incomprehensible, unjustifiable, absurd”—I think that that was a very important thing.⁴⁴

The promise of scientifically based humanities over philosophical rhetoric—though in reality Lévi-Strauss mixed both with abandon—was potent for young thinkers searching for a foothold in what had become a highly politicized activity. Technical terminology of “signs,” “signifiers” and “oppositions,” which had been road tested in linguistics, a discipline with true scientific pretensions, seemed more concrete than the interpretive terms from German philosophy like “ontotheology,” “Dasein” and “noema” that they replaced. Like logical positivism after the First World War, structuralism offered to clean up philosophy, rid it of its vagueness and solipsistic reflections; but unlike logical positivism, it was built not on empiricism, but on high rationalism.

In his “ethnography” of French academic life, Homo Academicus, Bourdieu places Lévi-Strauss’s attack on Sartre at the center of seismic changes in the intellectual ecology of the times. It signaled the rise of the social sciences, the ascendance of anthropologie (as opposed to the narrower, more specialized ethnologie) as a grand synthesizing discipline. Together with linguistics and history, anthropology was supplanting philosophy’s unquestioned superiority. The journal L’Homme, along with the already well-established history periodical Les Annales, had begun overtaking Les Temps modernes, which was “relegated to the status of purveyor of partisan, Parisian literary essays.”⁴⁵ Seen in this light, Lévi-Strauss’s continuing assault on the importance of history was a battle fought within a battle, a tussle for leadership within the newly emergent elite of the humanities.

 

 

THE PHILOSOPHICAL TIDE was turning. Once more, a clear choice was opening up between what writer and philosopher Alain Badiou defined as the two branches of twentieth-century French thought: the Bergsonian philosophy of “vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming,” and the Brunschvicgian philosophy of “the mathematically based concept”—or theories which took subjective experience as their point of departure as opposed to theories which looked at relationships between objects and concepts in the world. One sought meaning; the other, form. Lévi-Straussian structuralism, unambiguously pitched at the formal end of the spectrum, represented a radical break from the post- World War II orthodoxy.⁴⁶

Ironically, given the severe, antihumanist tone of all his work, Lévi-Strauss’s philosophical reflections threw up the image of a persona. He had set about delineating a style of thinking, but he ended up with a figure—not so much a noble savage as an indigenous bon vivant. A connoisseur and sensualist with a taste for avant-garde cut-up techniques, Lévi-Strauss’s savage had an intuitive grasp of what Western thinkers had toiled for centuries to articulate. A logician of nature, he perceived “as through a glass darkly” (comme à travers un nuage) principles of interpretation that were only then becoming evident through the high tech of the times—simple computers and low-powered electron microscopes. A bricoleur, he recalled the ingenuity of the French artisan—a dying breed in an era of rapid, standardized industrialization.⁴⁷

In the book’s final pages, the presence of the figure behind la pensée sauvage was almost tangible, like an allegorical character in an ideas-driven novel, as Lévi-Strauss resorted to a string of metaphors and comparisons to explain how he saw the mysterious operations of “wild thought.” He is glimpsed in the Aboriginal intellectual—a stock figure in Lévi-Strauss’s writing since Les Structures élémentaires—scratching diagrams in the desert sands to represent his complex kinship systems, likened to a poly-technic professor demonstrating a mathematical proof on a lecture hall blackboard. In the final pages he reappears metaphorically, standing in a furnished room, surrounded by mirrors, each slightly off center, reflecting fragments of furniture and decoration that he has to piece together to somehow form a whole, like imagines mundi—the medieval allegories of continents with which scholars adorned maps and bibles.

Lévi-Strauss’s savage was an amalgam of his own tastes and preferences—a mix of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of tradition and the avant-garde. It was his alter ego, fragments of who he was and who he wanted to be. The bond was intellectual. Perhaps he had been attracted to anthropology, he had mused in Tristes Tropiques, “because of a structural affinity between the civilisations it studies and my particular way of thinking.”⁴⁸ Dreamed up in the library rather than the field, this persona bore little relation to the indigenous peoples he had actually met in the flesh and blood a quarter of a century before. When asked in 2005 by academic Boris Wiseman about his experiences as an ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss was frank:

Wiseman: What in particular did you admire about the Caduveo?

Lévi-Strauss: The ceramics and the body art—they were great artists.

Wiseman: Did you admire their way of life?

Lévi-Strauss: Not at all—they lived like poor Brazilian peasants.

[. . .]

Wiseman: Did you speak about France [to the Nambikwara]?

Lévi-Strauss: Very little—the means of communication were very limited.

Wiseman: Did you identify with the Indians you studied?

Lévi-Strauss: No, not at all!⁴⁹

The image of the allegorical savage flickered faintly under the gloss of the intellect, pure thought, structure, but in the final pages of La Pensée sauvage it was snuffed out. The ultimate goal of the human sciences, wrote Lévi-Strauss, was “not to constitute, but to dissolve man.” Four years later, in Les Mots et les choses, Foucault would add a lyrical touch to a similar idea: “Man is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things,” he argued. “It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief, to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge.” Under a different configuration of knowledge, he concluded, in one of the most quoted lines from the era, “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”⁵⁰