Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory

by Patrick Wilcken

  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.

  48 Ibid., p. 14.

  49 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 221.

  50 Ibid., p. 239.

  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.

  55 Ibid., p. 275.

  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.

  60 Ibid., p. 283.

  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.

  64 Ibid., p. 320.

  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.

  81 Ibid., p. 111.

  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.

  2 Ibid., pp. 325-28.

  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.

  11 Ibid., p. 50.

  12 Ibid., p. 51.

  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.

  25 Ibid., p. 374.

  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.

  41 Ibid., pp. 495-500.

  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.

  45 Ibid., p. 103.

  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.

  49 Ibid., pp. 389-90.

  50 Castro Faria, Um outro olhar, p. 131;
Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, p. 1727.

  51 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Picador, p. 416.

  52 Ibid., pp. 421-22.

  53 Ibid., p. 449.

  54 Ibid., p. 435.

  55 Ibid., pp. 434, 221.

  56 Ibid., p. 436.

  57 Ibid., p. 451.

  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.

  5 Ibid., 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.

  22 Ibid.

  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.

  31 Ibid., p. 26.

  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.

  37 Ibid., p. 259.

  38 Ibid., p. 263.

  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.

  50 Ibid., p. 143.

  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.