Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  Somewhere between the ramshackle halls of the Musée de l’ethnographie and the professionalized galleries of the Musée de l’Homme, modern French anthropology was born. As Lévi-Strauss grew up, sociological investigations into ritual and religion were flowering into a peculiarly rich form of anthropological inquiry. Academics who had gathered around Émile Durkheim’s influential Année sociologique—a journal promoting the sociological approach, founded at the end of the nineteenth century—were branching off into investigations of totemism, sacrifice and “primitive” religious thought. The new discipline both capitalized on and fed into the vogue for the exotic. It dabbled in the avant-garde—particularly the emerging surrealist movement, which had also become bound up in the idea of the primitive—even as it began moving off in a more scholarly direction.

  Durkheim’s nephew Marcel Mauss was a key early figure. At the turn of the twentieth century he had taken up a chair in the History of the Religions of Uncivilized Peoples (Histoire des religions des peuples non civilisés) at the Fifth Section of the École pratique des hautes études (which Lévi-Strauss would occupy half a century later) at a time of intense speculation about the origins of modern religion. Mauss had built up an encyclopedic knowledge of what was then known about tribal societies from compilations of reports of colonial administrators, missionaries and explorers, as well as the first professional ethnographic studies coming out of Britain and the United States. Throughout his career he mined these materials, producing a series of strange, but brilliant, synthetic studies: on personhood, prayer, bodily movements and the suggestibility of death. He wrote one short classic, Essai sur le don (published in English as The Gift), on which Lévi-Strauss would later draw heavily, but he also left behind a slew of unfinished works.3

  Mauss was acutely aware that while L’Année sociologique was moving on to anthropological terrain, France lagged behind Britain and the United States institutionally. He dreamed of creating a “bureau, institute, or department of ethnology, whatever you want to call it” to bring together a subject then strewn across different institutions—the École coloniale, the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle, and his own academy, the Fifth Section of the École pratique des hautes études. But it was not until well after the death of his uncle, along with several talented members of the Année sociologique school in the First World War, that Mauss finally won backing for the Institut d’ethnologie, which opened on the rue Saint-Jacques in 1926.4

  With an athletic build, piercing eyes, a full beard and a “cavernous voice,” Mauss gave dazzling, improvised lectures at the institute, teaching not just anthropology students, but missionaries and colonial administrators as well. He peppered his lectures with cultural minutiae from around the world, moving from anthropological sensationalism—cannibalism, priestess prostitutes and bizarre forms of circumcision—to a celebration of the prosaic: “A tin can characterises our societies better than the most sumptuous jewel or the rarest stamp.”5 At the same time he gave his students practical fieldwork advice—develop film quickly, write up an inventory of objects on index cards, keep a field journal, “don’t be credulous, don’t be surprised, don’t lose your temper”—as well as possible areas of study: types of weapons, methods of preparing food (raw, smoked, dried, boiled, roasted, fried), varieties of fabrics. The irony was that Mauss disliked travel, even in Europe, and except for a brief period in Morocco, never did any meaningful fieldwork himself.

  Mauss’s ideas resonated not just with those wanting to study indigenous culture, but also with interested amateurs, philosophers and artists. Intellectuals in search of new ideas, like the writer Georges Bataille, turned toward the rich and varied veins that ran through the ethnographic record. What had once been relegated to an antiquarian pursuit was now considered quintessentially modern. Traffic flowed both ways. Out of hours, Mauss and his students would meet and talk late into the night on the terrace of the Café de Flore, a favorite haunt of avant-garde artists and poets; on Saturdays they would go to see African-American dancer Josephine Baker at the Bal nègre on the rue Bonnet.

  In 1920s Paris, Africa—or some French metropolitan version of it—became a cultural touchstone. Paris’s Belle Époque music halls, like the Folies-Bergères, the Casino de Paris and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, had once hosted a promiscuous mix of burlesque, animal acts, dance and theater. By the 1920s they were booked up with jazz bands, made up of African-American soldiers who had stayed on after the First World War. Writer, surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris, seven years Lévi-Strauss’s senior, remembered being caught up in the experience: “Jazz was a rallying cry, an orgiastic banner in the colors of the moment,” he recalled. “It was the first manifestation of the nègres, the myth of the coloured Edens which was to lead me as far as Africa, and, beyond Africa, to ethnography.”6

  ALTHOUGH FRENCH ANTHROPOLOGY was still only a suggestive collection of ideas and influences, the renewed interest in indigenous cultures inspired a rethink of the dusty collections in the Palais du Trocadéro. In 1928, sociologist Paul Rivet took charge of the museum and, assisted by amateur jazz player and curator Georges-Henri Rivière, began work. They cleared out exhibition spaces, sifted through the piles of artifacts, organizing them into metal cabinets, and glassed in a semicircular gallery on the second floor. Helped by high-society volunteers—well-heeled ladies of leisure—they modernized and expanded the library and began labeling exhibits. Rivet installed the collection he had brought back from Mexico, while trying to give some coherence to the vast backlog of nineteenth-century exotica.

  Rivet and Rivière were resourceful, with a nose for publicity and fund-raising opportunities. They brokered agreements with the governor general of Algeria and North African colonial officials to mount the hugely successful Exposition du Sahara, showcasing ethnographic artifacts from across the region. At the opening of the Oceania hall, they invited Paris’s top models to parade through the galleries. A fund-raising event pitted the “African” (in fact Panamanian) featherweight boxing star Al Brown against Marcel Mauss himself.7

  Lévi-Strauss would become one of the most influential figures to emerge from this fertile amalgam of art and ideas—a tension between the aesthetic object and the ethnographic artifact that has run through the French tradition, recently resurfacing in the debates around the opening of the Musée du quai Branly.8 Lévi-Strauss was one of the few early-wave French anthropologists not to attend Mauss’s lectures, but his upbringing was suffused with the arts, and as a young man he got to know many in the surrealist movement, including André Breton. Although he would progressively disown his modernist roots, the texture of his early influences is present throughout his oeuvre. His path into the discipline would be circuitous. Like many who ended up in the field, Lévi-Strauss took a poorly signposted track leading off the arterial route of philosophy—still very much the main thruway of the French academic system—and kept on going.

  LÉVI-STRAUSS WAS BROUGHTUP in a secular Jewish family, descendant on both sides from the Alsace, in an apartment on rue Poussin at the edge of Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement. Wedged between the Bois de Boulogne and the Seine, the area was only semiurbanized; there were small farms down the end of the road, along with cheap-rent brocantes and artist studios in what was then a relatively poor corner of Paris. The apartment block itself was built only a few years before his birth. The only thing that now distinguishes it from the rows and rows of mid-nineteenth-century blocks that stretch across Paris are a few neo-Gothic touches: two black cast-iron vines that climb up the iron-and-glass doors at the front entrance; the ornamental foliage, molded from concrete, that supports the building’s semicircular balconies.

  Although the family was of modest means, Lévi-Strauss grew up hearing stories from a lost nineteenth-century idyll—an aristocratic world of orchestras and fine art. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss had moved from Strasbourg to Paris in 1826 at the age of twenty and studied violin at the Paris Conservatoire. Starting out as a violinist at
the Théâtre-Italien, he went on to make his name as a conductor, composer and orchestra director, running the spa orchestra in Vichy under Napoléon III, and ensembles at the Tuileries imperial balls and the Paris Opéra. He worked with Offenbach and even appears fleetingly in the memoirs of Berlioz. On his travels through Europe he bought up furniture and art, later focusing on Jewish ritual objects—Sabbath lamps, spice boxes and Esther scrolls—with which he filled the “Villa Strauss” in Vichy. The remnants of the collection are now displayed in the Salle Strauss at the Musée de Cluny in Paris.

  Through the next generation, and the economic downturn of the 1880s, the family’s fortunes waned. Lévi-Strauss’s father, Raymond, was forced down a more prosaic route, studying at the École des hautes études commerciales and eventually finding menial work on the Paris Bourse. He married his second cousin Emma Lévy, the daughter of a rabbi, who had been sent to Paris to study typing and shorthand. A sensitive man with a passion for the arts, Raymond was not able to settle into the life of a minor functionary. Frustrated by his work at the Bourse, he made a bold decision: he enrolled at the École des beaux-arts and began portrait painting for a living. “His god was Maurice Quentin de la Tour,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled, referring to the eighteenth-century rococo portraitist. “He did a lot of pastels and obviously was not in touch with his times.”9 It was while Raymond was working on a commission in Brussels, on November 28, 1908, that Emma bore him his only child, Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss. Until his death Lévi-Strauss kept one of his father’s paintings of the view from the window of the room in which he was born, as an objet mémoire. Raymond would go on to produce several evocative canvases of his son, including one as a young boy in a striped smock on a rocking horse and another soft pastel portrait of him as a young man.

  While Lévi-Strauss’s upbringing could not exactly be described as poor, his father’s career choice meant that they would always be struggling bourgeoisie rather than solidly middle class. Raymond and Emma brought up their son in the classic bourgeois lifestyle, taking summer holidays on the beaches of Normandy and Brittany and even managing, in the 1920s, to buy a derelict property in the south of France, in the Cévennes, where they spent the summers. But there was periodic financial turbulence—the desperate months when the commissions dried up. The downturns were eased by the support of their extended family, with which they maintained strong ties. Given that Lévi-Strauss’s parents were second cousins, the families were close—so close that “it would be more accurate to speak of one family, rather than two,” Lévi-Strauss later recalled.10 Each week they would gather at his paternal grandmother Léa Strauss’s house. Once a year she would take the covers off the furniture in the dining room and the family came together for a meal. After lunch they would tour Paris’s cemeteries, visiting the graves of their forebears.

  When the First World War broke out, Lévi-Strauss’s father was mobilized, securing the comparatively safe position of ambulance attendant due to his fragile health. Emma, fearing an invasion of Paris, left with her son, then five, traveling to Normandy and on to Brittany to join her sisters and their children. When the danger had abated, the entourage moved down to stay in Rabbi Lévy’s huge house in Versailles, close to where Lévi-Strauss’s father had been stationed.

  In Versailles, Lévi-Strauss would have his first, contradictory, experiences of his Jewish roots. On one side was his grandfather, the rabbi—a timid but deeply religious man. His rambling house was both a home and a place of worship. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss recalled the sense of anguish he had felt as a child, walking down an inner passageway that led to the synagogue, from the warmth of the profane to the coolness of the sacred. He remembered the deadness of that room, only temporarily enlivened by his grandfather’s services, as well as the few cryptic references to religion that punctuated his stay: his grandfather praying in silence before each meal; his grandmother fasting during Yom Kippur; a religious scroll on the dining room wall that read: “Chew your food well for the good of your digestion.”11

  Other memories were of his mother, who despite being the daughter of a rabbi had been educated along with her sisters in a Catholic convent school. She would surreptitiously hand out sandwichs jambon in the park, Lévi-Strauss and his cousins wolfing them down crouched behind statues so as not to upset their grandfather. On Lévi-Strauss’s father’s side, the Jewish legacy was more bizarre. One uncle, who became obsessed with biblical exegesis, committed suicide when Lévi-Strauss was three; another, in an act of rebellion, was ordained as a priest, but ended up working in a lowly position for the gas board.

  As far as Lévi-Strauss’s parents were concerned, religion was background noise to an otherwise secular family life. They did not observe holy days, “but they used to talk about them.”12 While in Versailles they gave Lévi-Strauss a bar mitzvah, largely for the benefit of his grandfather. At their core they were French patriots—in Versailles, encouraged by his parents, the young Lévi-Strauss donated his pocket money to the war effort. On Armistice, Lévi-Strauss remembered his father taking him to watch the victory parades from the vantage point of a building near the Opéra. Nevertheless, the family’s vaguely conceived Jewish identity would play a decisive role in the rest of their lives. Lévi-Strauss learned early what it would mean to have a Jewish-sounding name in a still profoundly anti-Semitic culture. At school he was bullied by other children, who called him “a dirty Jew.” “How did you react?” he was asked in an interview for Le Magazine littéraire in the 1980s. “With a punch”—le coup de poing—he replied. The bullying turned to persecution in the next world war, during which his family would lose everything and he would be forced to flee for his life.

  LÉVI-STRAUSS WAS AN ONLY CHILD with a lively imagination at play in the clutter of the rue Poussin apartment-cum-atelier. The apartment was a storehouse of intellectual and artistic raw material—easels, canvases, tubes of paint, a makeshift darkroom where his father developed photos of his sitters, antiques and shelves of books. “My father and two of my uncles were painters [including the successful Belle Époque painter Henry Caro-Delvaille]. That is to say my mother and two of her sisters married painters and I was born and raised in artist ateliers . . . It was not at all an academic background . . . I had pencils and paintbrushes in my hands when I was learning to read and write,” he later remembered.13

  In the midst of his father’s cultural bric-a-brac, the young boy constructed his own eclectic fantasies. He listened to records of American spirituals on the family gramophone and spent his pocket money on miniature Japanese furniture that he bought from a shop on the rue des Petits-Champs. Arranging the delicate pieces in a box lined with Japanese printed fabric that his father had given him, he conjured up a scaled-down version of a Far Eastern room. He became obsessed with a condensed version of Cervantes’s Don Quixote with a pink-tinged cover, which he claims to have read and memorized by the time he was just ten years old. His parents would entertain guests by getting them to open the book at random and start reading, at which point Lévi-Strauss would continue without hesitation.14 During lunches at his grandparents’ place he would sit in a corner chuckling to himself as he read the nineteenth-century vaudeville plays of Eugène Labiche.15

  Raymond Lévi-Strauss gave his son an enviable cultural grounding on slender means. He would book the cheapest obscured-view seats at the opera, introducing his son to Wagner’s repertoire from an early age. They went every week to the Colonne and Pasdeloup classical concerts at Châtelet, spent long afternoons in the Louvre, and in adolescence Claude took violin lessons at the Opéra. His father’s friends—a lively group of critics, writers and artists—would mill around the apartment in the evenings and on the weekends. Many took to the boy, indulging his curiosity, recommending books, paintings and music.

  Encouraged by his father, the young Lévi-Strauss tried his hand at all the arts. “Working with bits of pastels that were lying around the studio, I began to draw what I imagined were cubist works . . . I can still
see my naïve compositions—everything was flat, two-dimensional, with no attempt to convey volume.”16 As an adolescent he took and developed his own photographs, invented film scenarios and composed trios for two violins and piano. He drew costumes and painted sets for operas, and even began work on a libretto, which he abandoned after writing the prelude.

  After the First World War, Lévi-Strauss enrolled in the Lycée Janson de Sailly, a few kilometers from his house, where he studied until sitting the baccalaureate. In contrast to the bohemian milieu of the rue Poussin, his education at Janson was strict, the atmosphere in the classroom imbued with an old-world formality. The beginning and end of lessons were announced by the beat of a drum; compositions were written “with anguish,” with the results solemnly read out in front of the class by the headmaster accompanied by his deputy, “leaving us despondent or overjoyed.” Indiscipline was severely punished.17 In the afternoons Lévi-Strauss would range around Paris, exploring the neighboring arrondissements on foot, “like Jalles and Jerphanion in Jules Romains novels.”18 He would jump on buses and ride the open platforms at the back as the bus weaved through Paris. When he was older, he set off with friends on voyages of discovery into the outer suburbs, getting as far as the gypsum quarries of Cormeilles-en-Parisis, some sixteen kilometers from the sixteenth arrondissement.