NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Cited in Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon,
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paula Wissing, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 94 (hereafter Eribon,
Conversations).
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, John and Doreen Weighman, trans., (London: Picador, 1989), p. 277. This image, taken on Lévi-Strauss’s earlier expedition among the Bororo, is reproduced in Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, Sylvia Modelski, trans. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), p. 87.
3 Lévi-Strauss’s wife Dina had left the expedition earlier, having contracted a virulent eye infection at the beginning of the trip.
4 See “Cahiers du terrain—Mai 1938,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
5 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1971), p. 59.
6 Marc Augé, “Ten Questions Put to Claude Lévi-Strauss,”
Current Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 1, February 1990, p. 86.
8 Eribon,
Conversations, p. 59. Lévi-Strauss quotes the expression of his friend and fellow Americanist Alfred Métraux.
10 Alfred Métraux,
Itinéraires 1 (1935-1953): Carnets de notes et journaux de voyage (Payot, 1978), p. 41.
11 Françoise Héritier in “Claude Lévi-Strauss était ‘un passeur exceptionnel,’ ”
Le Monde, November 4, 2009.
12 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
13 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 71; Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, eds. Vincent Debaene et al, Gallimard: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2007, p. 47.
14 See Denis Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Plon, 2003), p. 404.
15 Cited in David Pace,
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 4.
1: EARLY YEARS
1 Marcel Fournier,
Marcel Mauss, Jane Marie Todd, trans. (Princeton, N.J.: Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 326.
2 Pablo Picasso cited in Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake,
Life with Picasso (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 257.
3 Marcel Mauss,
The Gift, Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societie, Ian Cunnison, trans. (London: Cohen & West, 1954).
4 Mauss ran the institute along with the sociologist Paul Rivet and the philosopher and theorist on “primitive mentality” Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
5 Fournier,
Marcel Mauss, pp. 277-78.
6 Michel Leiris,
L’Âge d’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), pp. 189-90; translation from Colin Nettelbeck,
Dancing with de Beauvoir: Jazz and the French (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 113.
7 James Clifford,
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., and London: University of Harvard Press, 1988), pp. 117-51.
9 Claude Lévi-Strauss in the documentary film by Pierre-André Boutang and Annie Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words (
Claude Lévi-Strauss par lui-même), Arte Éditions, 2008, time code 33:43.
10 From a 1973 interview with Jean-José Marchand for L’Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision française (l’ORTF), reprinted in
Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Emile Joulia, (Paris: Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès, 2008), p. 167.
11 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 300.
12 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 6.
13 Levi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 32:08.
14 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, pp. 93-94.
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 275.
18 Lévi-Strauss is referring here to Romains’s twenty-seven volume
Les Hommes de bonne volonté (1932-46) novel cycle, set around the time of Lévi-Strauss’s childhood. The characters—the philosopher Pierre Jallez and the politician Jean Jerphanion—become friends as students at the École normale supérieure in the first volume and then reappear throughout the novels as commentators, discussing contemporary events and French society, in letters and on long walks through Paris.
19 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 494.
20 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 1, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 15.
21 Interview with Jean-José Marchand for l’ORTF in
Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, p. 174.
22 Vauxcelles had coined the terms
fauvisme and
cubisme (“Braque reduces figures, houses to geometric schemes, to cubes”) along with the less memorable
tubisme to describe Léger’s tubular style, but was an arch-skeptic of modernism. He was cool toward Lévi-Strauss’s topic, but nevertheless encouraged him to write.
23 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 172.
25 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 28.
26 Claude Lévi-Strauss interview with Philippe Simonnot, “Claude Lévi-Strauss: un anarchiste de droite,”
L’Express, October 17, 1986.
27 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 8.
28 See the interview with Jean-José Marchand for l’ORTF, reprinted in
Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, pp. 170-71.
29 Cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 27.
30 Although not at that point integrated into the Sorbonne.
31 Claude Lévi-Strauss interview with Jean-José Marchand, Arte France TV, 1972. In a more acerbic mood, he told a
Time magazine journalist in the 1960s that he had chosen philosophy “not because I had any true vocation for it, but because I had sampled other branches of learning and detested them, one and all,” in “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,”
Time, June 30, 1967.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 31:25.
33 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 31.
34 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Autoportrait,”
Le Magazine littéraire, hors-série no. 5, 4e trimestre, 2003, p. 8; Eribon,
Conversations, p. 8.
35 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 15.
36 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 49.
38 Claude Lévi-Strauss, signed Georges Monnet, “Picasso et le Cubisme,”
Documents, Picasso special edition, 1929-30, pp. 139-40.
39 Fournier,
Marcel Mauss, p. 285.
40 A. A. Akoun, F. Morin and J. Mousseau, “A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss,”
Psychology Today, vol. 5, 1972, p. 83.
41 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 42;
Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, p. 169.
42 Lévi-Strauss quoted in 1929 in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 44.
43 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 64.
44 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 12.
48 Pierre Dreyfus would go on to become CEO of Renault and serve under François Mitterrand as minister for industry.
49 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 34:23.
50 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 69; Richard Fortey, “Life Lessons,”
Guardian, April 7, 2005.
51 “three sources of inspiration” in Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 71; “
trois maîtresses” in
Tristes Tropiques in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 46.
52 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Ce que je suis,”
Le Nouvel Observateur, June 28, 1980, p. 16.
53 Paul Nizan,
Aden Arabie, Joan Pinkham, trans. (New York and London:
Monthly Review Press, 1968), pp. 61, 65.
54 Véronique Mortaigne, “Claude Lévi-Strauss, grand témoin de l’Année du Brésil,”
Le Monde, February 22, 2005.
55 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 71.
56 See James A. Boon,
From Symbolism to Structuralism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), p. 144.
57 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 55-56.
58 Jean Maugüé,
Les Dents agacées (Paris: Éditions Buchet/Chastel, 1982), p. 76.
59 Quoted in Thomas E. Skidmore, “Lévi-Strauss, Braudel and Brazil: A Case of Mutual Influence,”
Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 22, no. 3, 2003, p. 345.
60 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 21.
61 France Antarctique was an attempt to establish a French Protestant colony in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay in 1555. The colony collapsed in religious acrimony before being routed by the Portuguese in 1560.
62 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 100.
63 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 12.
64 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 47.
2: ARABESQUE
1 Lévi-Strauss, “Postscript to Chapter XV,”
Structural Anthropology, Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 332.
2 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 75.
4 Maugüé,
Les Dents agacées, p. 81.
5 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 77-84.
8 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
9 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 104.
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades de São Paulo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), p. 18.
13 Oscar Niemeyer,
The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 62.
14 “A Frenchman feels at home in Brazil,” wrote Louis Mouralis, a French travel writer who visited the northeast and São Paulo in the early 1930s; the “language is spoken widely; culture, assimilated unevenly but often well, is topic of conversation; customs and everyday opinions similar, with a more marked Iberian accent.” In
Brazilian Mosaic: Portraits of a Diverse People and Culture, ed. G. Harvey Summ (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 1995), p. 102.
15 Lévi-Strauss, interview with
L’Express, trans. Peter B. Kussell, in
Diacritics, vol. 1, no. 1, Autumn 1971, p. 45.
16 Peter Fleming,
Brazilian Adventure (London: World Books, 1940), p. 71.
17 Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 22.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades de São Paulo, pp. 25, 51, 71, 80.
19 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 138; Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 20.
20 Maugüé,
Les Dents agacées, p. 102.
21 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 23.
22 Fournier,
Marcel Mauss, p. 291.
23 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 20.
24 Fernanda Peixoto, “Lévi-Strauss no Brasil: a formação do etnólogo,”
Mana, vol. 4, no. 1, 1998, pp. 90-91.
26 Lévi-Strauss, interview with
L’ Express, in
Diacritics, p. 45.
27 Braudel cited in Thomas E. Skidmore, “Lévi-Strauss, Braudel and Brazil,” p. 345.
28 These included Sérgio Milliet, Rubens Borba de Moraes, Paulo Duarte and Mário de Andrade.
29 Dina was also the driving force behind the founding, with Andrade, of the Ethnographic and Folklore Society.
30 Cited in Dorothea Voegeli Passetti,
Lévi-Strauss, Antropologia e arte: minúsculo- incomensurável (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2008), pp. 85, 93.
32 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 150.
34 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 21.
35 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 197.
39 Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 21.
40 Variously spelled Caduveu, Kaduveu, Kaduveo; I use Lévi-Strauss’s spellings for indigenous names throughout.
41 Dina Lévi-Strauss, “
Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires 2/10, récit du voyage São Paulo-Porto Esperança par Dina Lévi-Strauss,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, p. 2.
43 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1724.
44 Now a separate state, Mato Grosso do Sul.
45 Dina Lévi-Strauss, “
Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires,” p. 3.
46 Re: Dina’s illness, which is not mentioned in
Tristes Tropiques, see Lévi-Strauss, “Note sur les expéditions,”
Oeuvres, p. 1724.
47 Dina Lévi-Strauss, “
Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires,” p. 10.
49 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 221.
51 “Lettres à Mário de Andrade,”
Les Temps modernes, no. 628, August-October 2004, p. 257.
52 Boris Wiseman,
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 137.
53 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 216-17.
54 Lévi-Strauss, “Le Coucher de soleil: entretien avec Boris Wiseman,”
Les Temps modernes , no. 628, p. 4.
56 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 15:30.
57 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 278-79.
58 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
59 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 279.
61 See footnote in Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Contribution à l’étude de l’organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo,”
Journal de la Société des Américanistes, vol. 28, no. 2, 1936, pp. 275-76.
62 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 22:50.
63 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 318.
65 In the documentary film
À propos de Tristes Tropiques, by Jean-Pierre Beaurenaut, Jorge Bodanzky and Patrick Menget, L’Harmattan et Zarafa Films, 1991.
66 Up until the middle of the twentieth century Mato Grosso was sometimes spelled with two
t’s.
67 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 21.
68 Cited in Luís Donisete Benzi Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas: os etnólogos no Conselho de Fiscalização das Expedições Artísticas e Científicas no Brasil, Hucitec/ ANPOCS, 1988, p. 137.
69 Lévi-Strauss, “Contribution à l’étude de l’organisation sociale des Indiens Bororo,” pp. 269-304.
70 Cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 95.
71 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 24.
72 Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas, p. 150.
73 Lévi-Strauss cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 90.
74 Lévi-Strauss cited in Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas, p. 124.
75 Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 56.
76 Maugüé,
Les Dents agacées, pp. 118-19.
77 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 158.
78 Maugüé,
Les Dents agacées, p. 121.
79 Lévi-Strauss,
Boletim da Sociedade de etnografia e folclore, no. 2, 1937, p. 5.
80 Maugüé,
Les Dents agacées, p. 121.
82 Lévi-Strauss in
Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 20.
83 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 54.
3: RONDON’S LINE
1 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 355.
3 On the extraordinary story of the building of the Rondon line, see Todd A. Diacon,
Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906-1930 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
4 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 357.
5 Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas, pp. 142-46.
6 Castro Faria interview,
Acervo Histórico de Luiz de Castro Faria, Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins, Rio de Janeiro, 1997.
7 Cited in Luiz de Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar: diário da expedição à Serra do Norte, (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro Sobre Azul, 2001), p. 17.
8 In Bernardo Carvalho,
Nine Nights, (London: Vintage Books, 2008), p. 33.
9 Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas, p. 152.
10 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 43.
13 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 345.
14 Luiz de Castro Faria interview, 1997.
15 Letter to Rivet, June 17, 1938, sent from Utiariti, in
Critique, no. 620-21, January- February 1999, reproduced between pages 96 and 97. Forty thousand francs was the equivalent of around twenty thousand dollars in today’s money.
16 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 346.
17 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 59.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 351.
19 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 63.
20 Lévi-Strauss, “Lettres à Mário de Andrade,” p. 260.
21 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 354; Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 68.
22 Lévi-Strauss cited in
Les Temps modernes, no. 628, pp. 260-61.
23 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 73.
24 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 363.
26 See Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 126.
27 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 374, 427.
28 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 85.
29 That is, fire, water, earth, sun, moon, wind, night; small, big, near, far, much, pretty, ugly. Lévi-Strauss also included Portuguese vocabulary, a language he was still struggling with. On one page he writes, “
Nombre d’expressions employées pour dire: on = ‘o homen,’ ‘o camarada,’ ‘o collega [
sic]
’, ‘o negro,’ ‘o tal,’ ‘o fulano’ ” (“Number of expressions used to say ‘one’ [in the sense of ‘you’]”); on another there is: “
Arroz-sem-sal (riz-sans-sel). On prononce ‘Rossemsal’ ” (“Rice without salt, pronounced ‘Rossemsal’”). Claude Lévi-Strauss, “
Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires 4/10 souvenirs,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, pp. 100, 104.
30 Lévi-Strauss’s field notes are now kept in his archive in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Excerpts have been published in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1617-26.
31 Cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 116.
32 See “Cahiers du terrain,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, boxes 4-6.
33 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, pp. 88, 93.
34 Ibid., p. 85; Castro Faria, “Mission Tristes Tropiques,”
Libération, September 1, 1988.
35 Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas, p. 152.
36 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, pp. 102, 109-10.
37 “
Route très longue et sans intérêt . . . une longue et pénible traversée de forêt sèche”: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Cahiers du terrain,” Campos Novos (2e quinzaine août 1938), Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
38 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 492-93.
39 Lévi-Strauss describes the play in
Tristes Tropiques, pp. 495-500; the text has been published in Gallimard’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition
Oeuvres, pp. 1632-50.
40 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 493.
42 Robert F. Murphy and Buell Quain,
The Trumaí Indians of Central Brazil, J. J. Augustin, 1955, pp. 103-6.
43 Alfred Métraux,
Itinéraires 1 (1935-1953): carnets de notes et journaux de voyage, Payot, 1978, p. 41.
44 Letter from Buell Quain to Heloísa Alberto Torres, August 2, 1939, in Mariza Corrêa and Januária Mello, eds.,
Querida Heloísa: cartas de campo para Heloísa Alberto Torres, ed. (Unicampo, 2008), p. 84.
46 The multiple interpretations have been spun together in Bernardo Carvalho’s mesmerizing fictionalized account
Nine Nights (London: Vintage Books, 2008).
47 Murphy and Quain,
The Trumaí Indians, p. 2.
48 Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 393.
50 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 131; Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1727.
51 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 416.
58 “
Impressionante. Ossos esmigalhados, nervos expostos, dedos partidos”: Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 174.
59 Reproduced in
Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, 1985, p. 56.
60 Reproduced in Marcel Hénaff, “Chronologie,”
Le Magazine littéraire, no. 311, 1993, p. 17; compare Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 191.
61 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 456-57.
62 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1767.
63 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 471-72.
64 Castro Faria,
Um outro olhar, p. 185.
65 In the 1950s Lévi-Strauss spent one week studying two villages in the Chittagong hill tracts in what was then western Pakistan, and in the 1970s he made two short visits to British Columbia—but it would be stretching it to define these trips as ethnographic fieldwork.
66 Lévi-Strauss cited in
Les Temps modernes, no. 628, p. 263.
67 See Lévi-Strauss, interview for
L’ Express, in
Diacritics, p. 47.
68 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in “Conversation with George Steiner,”
BBC Third Programme, October 29, 1965.
69 Lévi-Strauss in “Le Coucher de soleil,” p. 6; Eribon,
Conversations, p. 45.
70 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, pp. 44-45.
71 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 492-93.
72 Castro Faria, “Mission Tristes Tropiques.”
73 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
74 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 8.
75 Alban Bensa, interview with the author, January 2008.
76 Alfred Métraux,
Itinéraires 1, p. 42.
77 In fact, counting all his expeditions, Lévi-Strauss left only 328 out of a total of 1,200 artifacts behind in Brazil—perhaps fortunately, for while his collections have been well preserved in Paris, the rest have languished uncataloged in the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da Universidade de São Paulo, where some pieces have simply disintegrated. See Elio Gaspari, “Parte da coleção de Lévi-Strauss virou pó,”
Folha de São Paulo, November 11, 2009. When I visited USP in 2005, staff at the museum were unable even to locate Lévi-Strauss’s collection.
78 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Plon, p. 29, my translation; the translation in
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 34, has the racist-sounding “half-naked nigger boys” for the far milder “
une bande de négrillons à demi nus” of the original.
4: EXILE
1 Denis de Rougemont,
Journal des Deux Mondes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 91. With the exception of the last phrase, “bitter yet cleansing wind,” the translation is taken from Jeffrey Mehlman,
Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944 (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 62-63.
2 “
Il respira profondément . . . de façon très vague, Paul Thalamas pensa à Berkeley et à la célèbre théorie par laquelle l’évêque anglais prétend prouver, par la différence entre les dimensions apparentes de la lune au zénith et sur l’horizon, la relativité de nos impressions visuelles”: Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1628, 1630.
3 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 91.
4 Lévi-Strauss in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 121.
6 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 122.
7 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
8 “
la bouffonnerie la plus totale”: Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 122.
9 Interview with Lévi-Strauss, Jérôme Garcin,
Boîte aux lettres, France 3, 1984.
10 Jean Rouch in Lucien Taylor, “A Conversation with Jean Rouch,”
Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 1991, p. 95.
11 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 25.
12 Gaston Roupnel in Fernand Braudel,
On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 7.
13 Conditions could be harsh. In Gurs, camp officials worked out that “Uncle Raaf,” which was cropping up with increasing frequency in letters to relatives, was a code word for hunger, and had all references cut by the censor. Richard Vinen,
The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 142.
14 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 26.
15 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
16 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 99.
17 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 24.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1734-35.
19 This is according to Lévi-Strauss himself, in an interview with the author, February 2007.
20 Victor Serge cited in Martica Sawin,
Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1995), p. 120.
21 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 25.
23 Victor Serge cited in Mark Polizzotti,
A Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), p. 494.
24 Victor Serge cited in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1736.
25 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 26.
26 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
27 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 25-26.
28 See Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Look, Listen, Read (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 143-51; “
prise de conscience irrationelle”: Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Regarder, écouter, lire (Paris: Plon, 1993), p. 141.
29 Breton in Polizzotti,
Revolution of the Mind, p. 496.
30 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 27-28.
32 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paul Hendrickson, “Behemoth from the Ivory Tower,”
Washington Post, February 24, 1978.
33 Polizzotti,
Revolution of the Mind, p. 497.
34 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 39; Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1736.
35 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 40.
36 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, pp. 259-60.
39 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Anthropology: Its Achievements and Future,”
Nature, vol. 209, no. 5018, January 1966, p. 10.
40 Lévi-Strauss in Tom Shandel,
Behind the Masks, National Film Board of Canada, 1973.
41 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Way of the Masks (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 10.
42 Waldberg in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 133.
43 This, according to the recollections of Claudine Herrmann—who was tutored by Lévi-Strauss in New York and ended up working for him, typing up his index cards for “a fantastic salary of three dollars an hour”—in
Lévi-Strauss: l’homme derrière l’oeuvre, ed. Joulia, pp. 20-21.
44 See picture inset between pages 264 and 265 in
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Michel Izard, (Paris: L’Herne, 2004).
45 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, p. 260.
46 Sawin,
Surrealism in Exile, p. 185.
47 Interview with Lévi-Strauss,
Boîte aux lettres.
48 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 31.
49 Waldberg in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 142.
51 Bill Holm and Bill Reid,
Indian Art of the Northwest Coast: A Dialogue on Craftsmanship and Aesthetics, (Houston: Institute of the Arts, Rice University, 1975), pp. 9-10.
52 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, pp. 260-61.
53 VVV: Poetry, Plastic Arts, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, no. 1, 1942, p. 2.
54 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Indian Cosmetics,”
VVV, no. 1, 1942, pp. 33-35.
55 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Souvenir of Malinowsky [
sic],”
VVV, no. 1, 1942, p. 45.
56 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 36.
57 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Scope of Anthropology, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 44.
58 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 38.
60 Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott,
New School: a History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986); Claus-Deiter Krohn,
Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Emmanuelle Loyer,
Paris à New York:
intellectuels et artistes français en exil (1940-1947), (Paris : Grasset, 2005).
61 Isabelle Waldberg in Patrick Waldberg,
Un amour acéphale: correspondance 1940- 1949 (Paris: Éditions de La Différance, 1992), pp. 184-85.
62 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, p. 102.
63 The Marx comparison is taken from Robert Parkin, “Structuralism and Marxism,” in
One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French and American Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 209.
64 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 43.
65 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, p. 267.
66 See, for instance, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini,
What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010).
67 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 41.
68 François Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1,
The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 (Minneapolis, Minn., and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 53.
69 Bengt Jangfeldt, “Roman Jacobson in Sweden 1940-41,”
Cahiers de l’ILSL, no. 9, pp. 141-49; Andrew Lass, “Poetry and Reality: Roman O. Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in
Artists, Intellectuals and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944, ed. Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. 173-84.
70 Lévi-Strauss, “Cahiers du terrain,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, boxes 4-6; “
langue semble différente”: “Cahiers du terrain,” Campos Novos (2e quinzaine août 1938), box 6.
71 Lévi-Strauss, interview for
L’Express, in
Diacritics, p. 47.
72 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 114.
73 Roman Jakobson,
Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 19.
76 Lévi-Strauss in ibid., “Preface,” p. xiii.
5 : ELEMENTARY STRUCTURES
1 Lévi-Strauss, “The family,” in
Man, Culture and Society, Harry L. Shapiro, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 357.
2 Fournier,
Marcel Mauss, p. 345.
3 Lévi-Strauss in Jean-Marie Benoît, “Claude Lévi-Strauss Reconsiders: From Rousseau to Burke,”
Encounter, no. 53, July 1979, p. 20.
4 Denis de Rougemont,
Journal des deux mondes (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), pp. 151-53.
5 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 226, 257.
7 Lévi-Strauss in
Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 23.
8 Mehlman,
Emigré New York, p. 133.
9 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 5.
10 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1689.
12 Lévi-Strauss, “Autoportrait,” p. 13.
13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 91-93.
14 Mehlman,
Emigré New York, p. 184.
16 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 45.
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “L’Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologie,”
Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, vol. 1, no. 2, August 1945, pp. 1-21, reprinted in
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 31-54.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 34, 46.
19 That is, societies in which descent is traced through the mother.
20 For Lévi-Strauss, the maternal uncle was a structural shorthand for a “wife-giver”—a role that could fall to others in the group. See his clarification of this point in Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, Monique Layton, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 83.
21 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 42.
22 Thanks go to my brother Hugo for this sentence.
23 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 50.
24 Annie Cohen-Solal, “Claude L. Strauss in the United States,”
Partisan Review, vol. 67, no. 2, 2000, p. 258.
25 Lévi-Strauss,
The Way of the Masks, p. 10.
26 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 48.
27 Lévi-Strauss in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 162.
28 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Use of Wild Plants in Tropical South America,”
Handbook of South American Indians: Physical Anthropology, Linguistics and Cultural Geography of the South American Indians, vol. 6, ed. Julian Steward (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1963), pp. 465-86.
29 Cohen-Solal, “Claude L. Strauss in the United States,” pp. 258-59.
30 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, p. 266.
31 Entry dated March 13, 1947, in Métraux,
Itinéraires 1, p. 171.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 56.
33 Cited in James Atlas,
Bellow: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), p. 138.
34 Michel Foucault in David Macey,
The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 33.
35 Lévi-Strauss cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 180.
36 In Fournier,
Marcel Mauss, pp. 349, 423.
37 Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 23.
38 Lévi-Strauss,
The Elementary Structures of Kinship, James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, trans. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969), p. 125. Lévi-Strauss cites Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, though selectively. When Stanner began fieldwork in the Daly River settlement in the Northern Territory in 1932, he wrote: “I was impressed by their genuine bewilderment and the comical expressions they wore when they found, after a vain attempt to work out the terms by clear marks in the soil, that they could not remember.” See Melinda Hinkson, “The Intercultural Challenge of W. E. H. Stanner’s First Fieldwork,”
Oceania, vol. 75, no. 3, March-June 2005, p. 198.
39 Lévi-Strauss,
Elementary Structures, p. xxiii.
40 Ibid., p. 12. Or, as he later put it: “The incest prohibition is thus the basis of human society; in a sense it
is the society,” in “The Scope of Anthropology,”
Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, p. 19.
41 Mauss,
The Gift, pp. 77-78.
42 Lévi-Strauss,
Elementary Structures, p. 454.
44 Subsequently rephrased by Lacan as, “It’s not the women, but the phalluses that are exchanged,” in Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 118.
45 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 105. Cf. a clear statement to the contrary in Lévi-Strauss’s early piece for the linguistic journal
Word (“L’Analyse structurale”): “In human society, it is the men who exchange women, and not vice versa,” in Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 47.
46 Lévi-Strauss,
Elementary Structures, p. 124.
49 Simone de Beauvoir, “L’être et la parenté,” cited in
Le Magazine littéraire, hors-série no. 5, 4e trimestre, 2003, p. 60.
50 Ibid., p. 63. The
la refers to
oeuvre.
51 Georges Bataille,
Eroticism, Mary Dalwood, trans. (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 200-201.
52 According to American anthropologist Robert F. Murphy, “
Les Structures was issued in a printing so limited that it was soon exhausted. Those in libraries either fell apart (the work was miserably manufactured) or were stolen, and the few remaining copies were treasured by their owners the way bootlegged copies of Henry Miller used to be,” in “Connaissez-vous Lévi-Strauss?”
Saturday Review, May 17, 1969, pp. 52-53, reprinted in
The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. E. Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1970), p. 165.
53 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, pp. 18-19.
54 Non-French-speaking anthropologists did, however, have an English summary of
Elementary Structures, written by the Dutch anthropologist Josselin de Jong, who, independently of Lévi-Strauss, had been toying with the same ideas in relation to ethnographic data in Indonesia.
55 In Stanley J. Tambiah,
Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 114-15.
56 From Cambridge University Anthropological Ancestors interviews at
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/25. The specifics of the argument are highly complex. See Leach’s original article, “The Structural Implications of Matrilineal Cross-Cousin Marriage,”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 81, 1951, pp. 166-67; and Tambiah’s summary in
Edmund Leach, p. 117.
57 Edmond Leach, “Claude Lévi-Strauss—Anthropologist and Philosopher,”
New Left Review, vol. I/34, November-December 1965, p. 20.
58 Lévi-Strauss,
Elementary Structures, p. 49, footnote 5. Lévi-Strauss was responding to a similar criticism made by David Maybury-Lewis.
59 See Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham, eds.,
Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 5.
60 See Maurice Godelier’s
Métamorphoses de la parenté (Paris: Fayard, 2004); and Jack Goody’s review, “The Labyrinth of Kinship,”
New Left Review, vol. I/36, November- December 2005.
61 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1659.
62 Lévi-Strauss,
Elementary Structures, p. xxvii.
63 See, for instance, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 10: “In
Les Structures , behind what seemed the superficial contingency and incoherent diversity of the laws governing marriage, I discerned a small number of simple principles, thanks to which a very complex mass of customs and practices . . . could be reduced to a meaningful system.”
6: ON THE SHAMAN’S COUCH
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Witch-doctors and psychoanalysis,”
UNESCO Courier, no. 5, 2008, pp. 31-32.
2 “Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Confrontation,”
New Left Review, vol. I/62, July-August 1970, originally published as “Réponse à quelques questions,”
Esprit, no. 322, November 1963.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” in
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 167-85.
4 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” in ibid., pp. 186-205.
5 Lévi-Strauss, “Witch-doctors and Psychoanalysis,” pp. 31-32.
6 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 204.
7 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
An Introduction to the Work of Marcel Maus, Felicty Baker, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 45.
8 Claude Lefort, “L’Échange et la lutte des hommes,”
Les Formes de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 17; originally published in
Les Temps modernes, no. 64, February 1951, pp.1400-17.
9 Lévi-Strauss,
The Scope of Anthropology, p. 50.
10 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 49.
11 Jonathan Judaken,
Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln, Neb.; Chesham: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), p. 69.
12 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 50.
13 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 165.
16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Kinship Systems of the Chittagong Hill Tribes (Pakistan),”
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 1952, pp. 40-51; “Miscellaneous Notes on the Kuki of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Pakistan,”
Man, vol. 51, December 1951, pp. 167-69.
17 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1689.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 169.
21 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 50.
23 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Anthropology and Myth: Lectures 1951-1982, Roy Willis, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 2.
24 For an account of Descola’s ordeal, see Philippe Descola,
The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle, Janet Lloyd, trans. (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 22-23.
25 Philippe Descola, interview with the author, February 2007.
26 Lévi-Strauss,
Anthropology and Myth, p. 199.
27 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 71. The notion that the brain might be made up of separate, semi-independent functions has in fact gained adherents since Lévi-Strauss ridiculed the idea in the 1950s; see Jerry Fodor’s
The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 1983).
28 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 70.
29 For tools, for instance, he proposed a scheme of analysis that involved three layers of differences: the way the tool was used (to strike, rub or cut); its leading edge (sharp, blunt or serrated); and how it was manipulated (with perpendicular, oblique or circular movements). Lévi-Strauss, in
An Appraisal of Anthropology Today, Sol Tax et al., eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 293.
33 Elisabeth Roudinesco,
Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 560.
34 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 209.
35 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Race et histoire (Paris: Gonthier, 1968), pp. 46-50.
36 At the Collège, the sacred had been conceived not so much in religious terms, but as anything that inspired a heightened sensitivity, whether it was awe, fear or fascination. In keeping with Bataille’s own intellectual obsessions, eroticism and death were thematic. The group was dedicated to resacralizing society, fusing it with the human energies that modernity had bleached out. Caillois became obsessed with the image of the female praying mantis, twisting her head back to devour her mate, an image he likened to the femme fatale in fiction—a woman luring her partner to his death.
37 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 85.
38 Roger Caillois, “Illusion à rebours,”
La Nouvelle revue française, no. 24, December 1954, pp. 1010-24; and no. 25, January 1955, pp. 58-70.
39 In Claudine Frank, ed.,
The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke, 2003), p. 48.
40 Caillois, “Illusion à rebours,” pp. 67-70.
41 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène couché,”
Les Temps modernes, no. 110, 1955, p. 1214.
42 Alfred Métraux in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 219.
43 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 85.
44 Lévi-Strauss, “Diogène couché,” pp. 1218-19.
7: MEMOIR
1 Pierre Mac Orlan,
La Vénus Internationale (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1923), pp. 236-37.
2 Jan Borm,
Jean Malaurie: un homme singulier (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 2005), pp. 53, 56.
4 Lévi-Strauss,
Le Magazine littéraire, no. 223, October 1985, p. 24.
5 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 130.
6 “Auto-portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in
Claude Lévi-Strauss, éditions inculte, 2006, p. 183; originally published in a special edition of the journal
L’Arc dedicated to the work of Lévi-Strauss, see
L’Arc, no. 26, 1965.
7 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 543.
8 “
Voyages = même chose et contraire d’une psychoanalyse”: “
Tristes Tropiques: Docs préparatoires 10/10 carnet vert,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque national de France, p. 56.
9 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 256: “In this charming civilisation, the female beauties trace the outlines of the collective dream with their make-up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it, and whose mysteries they disclose as they reveal their nudity.”
10 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1695.
11 “
Que sont nos poudres et nos rouges à côté!”: “
Tristes Tropiques: vol. 2 de la dactylographie,” Archives de Lévi-Strauss, Bibliothèque nationale de France, p. 200.
12 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1746, 1769.
13 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 15-16.
14 Lévi-Strauss cited in Grupioni,
Coleções e expedições vigiadas, p. 150.
15 Cited in Pace,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 20-21.
16 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:04:50.
17 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 43.
18 Tragically, much later the Nambikwara would suffer the side effects of cooking food in empty drums of DDT.
19 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, pp. 534-35.
21 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, 1989, p. 256.
22 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Des Indiens et leur ethnographe,”
Les Temps modernes, no. 116, August 1955, pp. 1-50.
23 Lévi-Strauss, “Des Indiens et leur ethnographe,”
Les Temps modernes, no. 116, August 1955, p. 1; translation from Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 229.
24 “shopgirl metaphysics”: Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 71; “
métaphysique pour midinette”: Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Plon, p. 63.
25 This is according to Jean Pouillon, Sartre’s friend and fellow editorial board member of
Les Temps modernes; see Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 7. Despite the apparent disjuncture,
Les Temps modernes would continue to publish essays by Lévi-Strauss, as well as commentaries on his work.
26 For a summary of reviews of
Tristes Tropiques in the French press, see Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 61, p. 133; Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 219.
27 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1717.
28 John Peristiany, “Social Anatomy,”
Times Literary Supplement, February, 22 1957; David Holden, “Hamlet among the Savages,”
Times Literary Supplement, May 12, 1961.
29 Susan Sontag, “A Hero of Our Time,”
New York Review of Books, vol. 1, no. 7, November 28, 1963.
30 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 59.
31 Interview with Luc de Heusch by Pierre de Maret,
Current Anthropology, vol. 34, no. 3, June 1993, pp. 290-91.
32 Jean Pouillon, “L’Oeuvre de Claude Lévi-Strauss,”
Les Temps modernes, no. 126, July 1956, pp. 150-73.
33 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 137.
35 Lévi-Strauss did intervene on one further occasion in 1968. He joined more than a hundred other academics, including Michel Leiris, Louis Dumont, Maxime Rodinson and Georges Balandier, in signing an open letter to the Brazilian military dictator, General da Costa e Silva, denouncing the atrocities suffered by the Brazilian indigenous peoples after a string of accusations of torture and murder were made against the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (Indian Protection Service).
36 Georges Charbonnier,
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), p. 13.
37 These included avant-garde musician Pierre Boulez, actress Simone Signoret, writer Marguerite Duras and Lévi-Strauss’s colleagues and friends Jean Pouillon and Michel Leiris.
38 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 230.
40 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 59.
41 “After
Tristes Tropiques there were times when I imagined that someone in the press was going to ask me to travel and write,” he later confessed, in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 159.
42 Lévi-Strauss cited in Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 220.
43 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 529.
45 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 7.
46 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 539.
47 See I. Strenski, “Lévi-Strauss and the Buddhists,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 22, 1980, pp. 3-22.
48 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 542; Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, 2007, p. 442.
49 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 541.
8 : MODERNISM
1 Karlheinz Stockhausen cited in Ivan Hewett, “Karlheinz Stockhausen Obituary,”
Guardian, December 7, 2007.
2 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 157.
3 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
4 Alex Ross,
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 392.
5 Kristin Ross,
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 1995), p. 2.
6 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 105.
7 Fernand Braudel,
On History.
8 Lévi-Strauss in Elisabeth Roudinesco,
Jacques Lacan & Co, p. 362.
9 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
10 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 207.
11 Edmund Leach,
Claude Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974), p. 65.
12 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 228.
13 In 1969, Lévi-Strauss told Canadian researcher Pierre Maranda that he “has never seen it as anything more than ‘a drawing’ to illustrate the ‘double twist’ which is translated with respect to the passage from metaphors to metonymies and vice versa,” in Elli K. Maranda and Pierre Maranda,
Structural Models in Folklore and Transformational Essays (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 28.
14 This point is taken from Dan Sperber, “Claude Lévi-Strauss Today,”
On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 65-66. For Sperber, in using the words “never ceased to be guided” by his formula, Lévi-Strauss “sounds not like a scientist but rather like a transcendental meditator claiming to be guided by his mantra.”
15 Lévi-Strauss, “The Story of Asdiwal,”
Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, p. 184.
16 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 229.
17 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 70.
18 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 160.
19 Foucault in ibid., p. 160.
20 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 68.
21 Although later Gallimard managed to publish a collection of essays and commentaries, as well as reissue
Race et histoire for its Folio collection; see Raymond Bellour and Catherine Clément, eds.,
Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Gallimard, 1979); Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Race et histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). At the end of Lévi-Strauss’s life, Gallimard also published a collection of his works in the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, see Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, eds. Vincent Debaene et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
22 Like his attacks on Caillois, these were rhetorical salvos. He dismissed the sociologist Georges Gurvitch, who had branded his attempts to mathematically model social relations “a complete failure,” as unqualified to comment on advances in anthropology. A similar ploy was used against Jean-François Revel, while Rodinson’s Marxist critique was batted straight back with the taunt “My conception is infinitely closer to Marx’s position than his,” based on a somewhat selective reading of
Das Kapital. Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, p. 338; Pace,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 96-99.
23 Beatriz Perrone Moisés, “Entrevista: Claude Lévi-Strauss, aos 90,”
Revista de antropologia , vol. 42, no. 1-2, 1999.
24 See Kristin Ross,
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, p. 186.
25 Despite the subject matter of his work, Marcel Mauss had occupied the sociology chair.
26 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 60.
27 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 61; Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon,
De près et de loin (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1988), p. 90.
28 Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,”
Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, pp. 7-8; Eribon,
Conversations, p. 61.
29 Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” pp. 6-7.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 63.
33 The Area Files were not without their critics. Margaret Mead apparently described the catalogs as “instant anthropology like instant coffee,” cited in Isac Chiva, “Une communauté de solitaires: le Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale,” in
Claude Lévi-Strauss , ed. Izard, p. 74.
34 Isac Chiva, “Une communauté de solitaires: le Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale,” p. 68; Susan Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero,” in
The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. Hayes and Hayes, p. 186.
35 See Louis-Jean Calvet,
Roland Barthes: A Biography, Sarah Wykes, trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 129-30.
36 The letter was later printed at the end of
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Raymond Bellour and Catherine Clément, pp. 495-97. Lévi-Strauss’s account is in Eribon,
Conversations , p. 73; Barthes’s “stunningly convincing” is cited in Dosse,
History of Structuralism , vol. 2,
The Sign Sets, 1967-present, Deborah Glassman, trans. (Minneapolis, Minn.; and London: University of Minnesota Press), 1997, p. 115.
38 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 34.
39 Pierre Dumayet with Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Claude Lévi-Strauss à propos de
Soleil Hopi.”
40 The interviews were later published as Georges Charbonnier,
Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Plon, 1969); English version: Georges Charbonnier,
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).
41 Charbonnier,
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 69-70.
42 Robert Hughes, “The Artist Pablo Picasso,”
Time, June 8, 1998.
43 These comments were mild in comparison to what was to come. Later Lévi-Strauss accused modern artists of polluting their sources of inspiration. In an interview for the review
Arts about a new exhibition of Picasso at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1966, he described the movement as something akin to “what the Americans call ‘interior decoration,’ a sort of accessory to the furnishings”; see Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, pp. 277, 283.
44 Lévi-Strauss, interview for
L’ Express, in
Diacritics, p. 50.
45 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, p. 278.
46 Charbonnier,
Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 32-42.
47 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 234.
48 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Entrevista: Lévi-Strauss nos 90, a antropologia de cabeça para baixo,”
Mana, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998, p. 119.
49 Vincent Debaene in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. xxxiv.
9: “MIND IN THE WILD”
1 Honoré de Balzac in Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), p. 130.
2 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Totemism, Rodney Needham, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 76.
3 Ibid., p. 97. The dolphin is, however, taboo for one specific lineage of the Tafua clan, the Korokoro.
4 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1775.
5 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 9.
6 “
dans un état de hâte, de précipitation, presque de remords,” Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1777.
7 Lévi-Strauss,
Totemism, p. 83.
8 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 262.
9 Lévi-Strauss,
Totemism, p. 72.
11 Ibid., p. 146. Fortes, for instance, had drawn parallels between the Tallensi’s highly complex totemic system and their ancestor cult. The Tallensi viewed their ancestors as “restless, elusive, ubiquitous, unpredictable, aggressive,” just like the crocodiles, snakes or leopard that featured in their totemic system.
14 Ibid., p. 162;
Le Totémisme aujourd’hui in Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 533.
15 Lévi-Strauss,
Totemism, p. 84.
16 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1792-93.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind, pp. 3-9.
19 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 34:23.
20 Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind, p. 149.
22 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 113.
23 Speaking of the Australian Aborigines, Lévi-Strauss said that in some respects they were “real snobs . . . as soon as they were taught the accomplishments of leisure, they prided themselves on painting the dull and studied watercolours one might expect of an old maid,” in Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind, p. 89.
24 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:10:00.
25 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 147-63.
26 Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind, p. 269.
27 See exchange in Claude Lévi-Strauss and Sybil Wolfram, “The Savage Mind,”
Man, vol. 2, no. 3, New Series, September 1967, p. 464; M. Estellie Smith, “Sybil Wolfram Obituary,”
Anthropology Today, vol. 9, no. 6, December 1993, p. 22.
28 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1799-1801.
29 Ibid., p. 1800, note 2.
30 “Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Confrontation,”
New Left Review, p. 72. The penultimate chapter, for instance, entitled “Le Temps retrouvé,” concludes with a diagram representing Australian Aboriginal ritual—a triangle whose apexes represent VIE (±), RÊVE (+) and MORT (−), a kind of
structuralisme à la Proust.
31 A. A. Akoun, F. Morin and J. Mousseau, “A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss,” p. 79.
32 “ ‘Les Chats’ de Charles Baudelaire,”
L’Homme, vol. 2, no. 1, 1962, pp. 5-22.
33 “Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Confrontation,”
New Left Review, p. 74.
34 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 279.
35 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 11.
36 “Claude Lévi-Strauss: A Confrontation,”
New Left Review, p. 74.
37 For critic Jean Lacroix writing in
Le Monde,
La Pensée sauvage represented “the most rigorously atheistic philosophy of our time,” while over two issues of
Les Temps modernes in 1963 he subjected Lévi-Strauss’s ideas to a Marxist critique; Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 234.
39 Letter from Sartre to de Beauvoir, February 1946, in Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,
Lettres au Castor et à quelques autres, vol. 2, (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 335.
40 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. 1778.
41 Lévi-Strauss,
The Savage Mind, p. xxi.
42 Ibid., pp. 257-58, 249.
43 Lévi-Strauss in Paul Hendrickson, “Behemoth from the Ivory Tower.”
44 Pierre Bourdieu, in
Réflexions faites, Arte France, March 31, 1991.
45 Pierre Bourdieu,
Homo Academicus, Peter Collier, trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. xxi.
46 Alain Badiou, “The Adventure of French Philosophy,”
New Left Review, vol. I/35, September-October 2005, p. 68.
47 This idea is taken from J. G. Merquior,
From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London: Verso, 1988), p. 89.
48 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 64.
49 Lévi-Strauss, “Le Coucher de soleil,” p. 4.
50 Michel Foucault,
Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 398.
10: THE NEBULA OF MYTH
1 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 35.
2 Lévi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 228-29.
3 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:15:00.
4 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Origin of Table Manners: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 3, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 102.
5 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in
Oeuvres, p. 1657.
6 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 132.
8 Sebag had been undergoing psychoanalysis with Lacan when he fell in love with Lacan’s daughter Judith. After Lacan ended the sessions, Sebag shot himself in the face.
9 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 1.
10 Sanche de Gramont (aka Ted Morgan), “There Are No Superior Societies,” in
The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. Hayes and Hayes, p. 16; originally published in the
New York Times Magazine, January 28, 1968.
11 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 4, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), p. 25; De Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” p. 17.
12 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 31.
13 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in
Oeuvres, p. 1664.
14 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in Conversation with George Steiner,”
BBC Third Programme. In this interview with the BBC in 1965, Lévi-Strauss made this link explicit, telling Steiner that while mythic structures recurred, there might be “several species” of myths.
15 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 3-6.
16 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in Conversation with George Steiner,”
BBC Third Programme.
17 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 15.
18 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, p. 219.
19 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 27.
21 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 20:10.
22 D. Antonio Colbacchini,
I Bororos Orientali: “Orarimugudoge” del Matto Grosso (Brasile), Torino, 1925. Just as Lévi-Strauss was finishing the final draft of
Le Cru et le cuit, another important Salesian source became available, the first volume of the
Enciclopédia Boróro, forcing him to delay publication until he had had a chance to read it and incorporate it into his analyses.
23 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 37.
25 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 2, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 469.
26 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, 1970, p. 335.
29 See Boris Wiseman’s interesting discussion on this point, linking this idea with similar sentiments expressed by the symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry, in
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 202-3.
30 Merquior,
From Prague to Paris, p. 128.
31 Also important was the work of Christian Metz, who introduced a Lacanian semiotic approach to film studies.
32 Anne-Christine Taylor, interview with the author, February 2007.
33 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. xiii.
35 Murphy, “Connaissez-vous Lévi-Strauss?” p. 165.
36 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 76.
37 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 291.
38 Guy Sorman, “Lévi-Strauss, New Yorker,”
City Journal, vol. 19, no. 4, November 6, 2009.
39 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in
Oeuvres, p. 1662.
40 De Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” pp. 9-10. Lévi-Strauss would later question the quality of Foucault’s scholarship and would even go on to vote against Foucault’s entry into the Collège.
41 This, according to a letter he sent to Catherine Backès-Clément on May 30, 1970; see Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 316.
42 Psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu expressed it well in relation to Lacan, who he felt was trapping students in an “unending dependence on an idol, a logic or a language, by holding out the promise of fundamental truths to be revealed but always at some further point, and only to those who continue to travel with him,” in a review of
Jacques Lacan by Elisabeth Roudinesco (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), by Richard Webster, “Lacan Goes to the Opera”
New Statesman (1996), vol. 126, November 7, 1997, p. 44(2).
43 Cited in Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 271.
44 De Gramont, “There Are No Superior Societies,” p. 18.
45 François Furet, “Les Intellectuels français et le structuralisme,”
L’Atelier de l’histoire, Flammarion, 1982, pp. 37-52; originally published in
Preuves, no. 92, February 1967.
46 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 1, p. 325.
47 Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves,
Introducing Lévi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000), p. 132.
48 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 133.
50 See David Maybury-Lewis, “The Analysis of Dual Organizations: A Methodological Critique,”
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vol. 116, no. 1, 1960, pp. 17-44; Claude Lévi-Strauss, “On Manipulated Sociological Models,” in ibid., pp. 45-54. Both are available online at
http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/.
51 David Maybury-Lewis, “Science or Bricolage?” in
The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. Hayes and Hayes, pp. 162, 154-55.
52 This was in relation to a review of the following volume,
The Origin of Table Manners , in the
New Yorker, July 30, 1979, p. 85.
53 Maybury-Lewis, “Science or Bricolage?,” pp. 161-62.
54 Needham, interview with the author, February 2006.
55 Needham puts it more strongly: “Professor Lévi-Strauss formally declined to examine the translation before it went to press, and has likewise abstained from reading the proofs,”
The Elementary Structures, 1969, p. xviii.
56 Needham, interview with the author, February 2006. The last-minute preface was compounded by other perceived slights—Needham said that when he wrote to Lévi-Strauss to let him know that he had burned all their correspondence, Lévi-Strauss wrote back saying that was fine, since there was nothing of any value there anyway. Needham said that, in person, he found Lévi-Strauss cold and not very forthcoming. When Lévi-Strauss came to Oxford to receive an honorary degree, Needham said, he never thanked anybody; he simply arrived, collected the degree and left—a description that does not tally with other people’s (including my) experiences with Lévi-Strauss. He was reserved and could be taciturn, depending on the circumstances, but he always made a point of being courteous.
57 Jeremy MacClancy, “Obituary: Rodney Needham, Oxford Social Anthropologist and Champion of Structuralism,”
Independent, December 13, 2006. Part of the problem was Needham’s own extreme sensitivity and eccentricities, which produced many rifts in his working life. After a dispute with colleagues, he moved his library out of the anthropology department and never set foot there again, teaching instead out of All Souls and relaying messages into the department via the porter.
58 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, February 2007.
60 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 13.
61 Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. 15.
62 Sperber,
On Anthropological Knowledge, p. 69.
63 Viveiros de Castro, “Entrevista: Lévi-Strauss nos 90,” p. 120.
64 Lévi-Strauss,
From Honey to Ashes, p. 473.
65 Lévi-Strauss,
The Naked Man, p. 291.
67 Lévi-Strauss,
The Origin of Table Manners, pp. 474-75.
68 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Le triangle culinaire,”
L’Arc, no. 26, 1965, pp. 19-29.
69 Lévi-Strauss,
The Origin of Table Manners, p. 484.
73 Lévi-Strauss,
The Raw and the Cooked, p. 26.
11: CONVERGENCE
1 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 142.
2 Cited in Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. 144.
3 “Man’s New Dialogue with Man,”
Time.
4 Although Foucault was not in Paris during the May ’68 protests (he was working at the University of Tunis), on his return he would become actively involved in the protest movement, siding with students at the newly established university, Paris VIII at Vincennes, where he was head of the philosophy department.
5 Calvet,
Roland Barthes, pp. 163-70.
6 “Le structuralisme, a-t-il été tué par Mai ’68?”
Le Monde, November 30, 1968.
7 Georges Balandier cited in François Dosse,
History of Structuralism, vol. 2, p. 152.
8 Lévi-Strauss, interview for
L’Express, in
Diacritics, p. 45.
9 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 283.
10 Except for lectures given over the 1968-69 academic year, in which Lévi-Strauss examined Salish mythological themes involving fire/water and fog/wind, which he would cover later in
Histoire de Lynx (1991).
11 Lévi-Strauss,
The Naked Man, p. 35.
13 Ibid., p. 510; “
nous comprenons pourquoi c’est lui, entre tous les mythes américains disponibles, qui s’est imposé à nous avant même que nous en sachions la raison,”
L’Homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971), p. 458.
14 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, pp. 136-37.
15 The reason he gave for having used
nous was to reduce the subject to “the insubstantial place or space where anonymous thought can develop, stand back from itself, find and fulfill its true tendencies and achieve organisation, while coming to terms with the constraints inherent in its very nature,” in Lévi-Strauss,
The Naked Man, p. 625.
16 Lévi-Strauss was drawing on the work of American scientist J. E. Amoore in the 1950s. In fact Amoore argued that only the first five smells were based on the molecule shape-receptor model; the last two, putrid and pungent, were recognized by their electrical charge. Other models of the perception of smell have since been proposed, including Luca Turin’s vibration theory, which forms the basis of Chandler Burr’s popular nonfiction book
The Emperor of Scent (Random House, 2003).
17 Lévi-Strauss,
The Naked Man, p. 692.
18 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:24:00.
19 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 84.
20 Pierre Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” in
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Michel Izard, p. 56.
23 See Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” p. 55; Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 397-98.
24 Claude Lévi-Strauss letter to Denis Kambouchner, cited in “Lévi-Strauss and the Question of Humanism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss, ed. Boris Wiseman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 37.
25 Bertholet,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, p. 369.
26 Cited in Pace,
Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes, p.193.
27 Count Gobineau was a thinker whom Lévi-Strauss greatly admired and whose ideas he had used in both
La Pensée sauvage and
L’Homme nu. Lévi-Strauss believed that Gobineau had been wrongly overlooked for holding views that, although unacceptable today, were commonplace in his own time. See Lévi-Strauss’s discussion in Didier Eribon,
Conversations, pp. 145-63.
28 Cited in Pace,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, pp. 193-94.
29 Lévi-Strauss, “Reflections on Liberty,”
The View from Afar, p. 280.
30 Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques, p. 106; Eribon,
Conversations, p. 3.
31 According to Maranda, in “Une fervente amitié,” p. 54.
32 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, p. 165, translation modified.
33 “Claude Lévi-Strauss in Conversation with George Steiner,”
BBC Third Programme.
34 Lévi-Strauss,
The Way of the Masks, pp. 5-8.
35 Pierre Maranda, an anthropologist interested in the structural approach, had met Lévi-Strauss several times in the 1960s, and in 1968 ended up working at Lévi-Strauss’s invitation as an associate director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études en sciences sociales; see his homage to his long friendship with Lévi-Strauss in Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” pp. 52-75.
36 Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 17.
37 For a brief and lucid demonstration of this, see Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of a comparison between the Salish and the Kwakiutl masks and myths in Tom Shandel,
Behind the Masks, National Film Board of Canada, 1973.
38 Maranda, “Une fervente amitié,” p. 57.
39 Lévi-Strauss in Didier Eribon,
Conversations, p. 95.
40 Lévi-Strauss,
The View from Afar, p. 235.
41 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 7, 9.
42 Lévi-Strauss in Didier Eribon,
Conversations, p. 91.
43 “Bernadette Bucher with Claude Lévi-Strauss, 30 June 1982,”
American Ethnologist, vol. 12, no. 2, 1985, pp. 365-66.
44 Lévi-Strauss, interview with the author, March 2005.
45 Lévi-Strauss in Tom Shandel,
Behind the Masks.
46 Claude Lévi-Strauss,
The Jealous Potter (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 190.
49 Lévi-Strauss, “Le Coucher de soleil,” p. 12. In an earlier interview, Lévi-Strauss was more direct: “I am by temperament somewhat of a misanthrope”; see A. A. Akoun, F. Morin and J. Mousseau, “A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss,” p. 82.
50 Lévi-Strauss in Augé, “Ten Questions Put to Claude Lévi-Strauss,” p. 85.
51 Lévi-Strauss in Eribon,
Conversations, pp. 87, 151.
55 See Lévi-Strauss, “Do Dual Organizations Exist?”
Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, pp. 132-63. In a complex analysis he found that features previously dismissed as anomalies in so-called dual-organization societies were integral to their structure. He went on to argue that there were really two different types of dualism, diametric and concentric, mediated by a ternary structure.
56 Rodney Needham, “The birth of the meaningful,”
Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 1984.
57 Cited in Tambiah,
Edmund Leach, p. 253.
58 Lévi-Strauss in Boutang and Chevallay,
Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words, 1:15:00.
59 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, pp. 1572-73.
60 Merquior,
From Prague to Paris, p. 191.
61 Cited in Didier Eribon,
Michel Foucault (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 161.
62 Lévi-Strauss,
Myth and Meaning, p. 47.
63 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien,”
Le Monde, February 22, 2005.
64 Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil, p. 142.
66 Clifford Geertz,
Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 25-26.
EPILOGUE
1 Lévi-Strauss cited in Paul Hendrickson, “Claude-Lévi Strauss: Behemoth from the Ivory Tower,”
Washington Post, February 24, 1978.
3 James M. Markham, “Paris Journal: A French Thinker Who Declines a Guru Mantle,”
New York Times, December 21, 1987.
4 Lévi-Strauss,
Oeuvres, p. lvii.
5 Claude Lévi-Strauss in Didier Eribon, “Visite à Lévi-Strauss.”
6 Lévi-Strauss in “Le Coucher de soleil: entretien avec Boris Wiseman,”
Les Temps modernes, no. 628, August-October 2004, p. 17.
7 Lévi-Strauss, “Entretien par Raymond Bellour,” in
Oeuvres, pp. 1654-55.
8 Gilles de Catheu, “Saudades do Brasil,”
O Globo, November 7, 2009.
9 There were a few dissenting voices, including a piece in the left-wing magazine
Marianne questioning his position on race and his attitude to Islam; see Philippe Cohen, “Lévi-Strauss sans formol,”
Marianne, November 4, 2009.
10 “Tous les anthropologues français sont les enfants de Claude Lévi-Strauss,”
Le Monde, November 3, 2009.
11 “Les obsèques de Claude Lévi-Strauss ont déjà eu lieu,”
Le Point, November 3, 2009.
FURTHER READING
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paula Wissing, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2. Georges Charbonnier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).
3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2006).
4. Pierre-André Boutang and Annie Chevallay, Claude Lévi-Strauss in His Own Words (Claude Lévi-Strauss par lui-même), Arte Éditions, 2008; Tom Shandel, Behind the Masks, National Film Board of Canada, 1973.
5. Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974).
6. David Pace, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Bearer of Ashes (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
7. François Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 1, The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 (Minneapolis, Minn., and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); History of Structuralism, vol. 2, The Sign Sets, 1967-present (Minneapolis, Minn., and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
8. Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves, Introducing Lévi-Strauss and Structural Anthropology (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000).
9. Dan Sperber, “Claude Lévi-Strauss Today,” in On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
10. Clifford Geertz, “The Cerebral Savage: On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
11. Howard Gardner,
The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic, 1987); John Sturrock,
Structuralism (London: Fontana, 1993); J. G. Merquior,
From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-structuralist Thought, (London: Verso, 1988); Boris Wiseman, “Claude Lévi-Strauss,” in Christopher John Murray, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought (New York; London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004);
http://www.routledge-ny.com/ref/modfrenchthought/levistrauss.PDF.
12. Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, ed. E. Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 1970).
13. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Picador, 1989).
14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” in The View from Afar, Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, Sylvia Modelski, trans. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
16. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 1, John and Doreen Weightman, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Naked Man: Introduction to a Science of Mythology 4, John and Doreen Weightman, trans., (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981).
17. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966).
18. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham, trans. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1969).
19. Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” in Structural Anthropology, vol. 1, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
21. Denis Bertholet, Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Plon, 2003).
22. Frédéric Keck, Lévi-Strauss et la pensée sauvage (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004); Frédéric Keck, Claude Lévi-Strauss, une introduction (Paris: Pocket, 2005); Frédéric Keck and Vincent Debaene, Claude Lévi-Strauss : L’homme au regard éloigné (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
23. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2007).