Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
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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.
20 Ibid., p. 348.
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.
34 Ibid., p. 266.
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.
39 Ibid.
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.
44 Ibid., p. 530.
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.
50 Ibid., p. 543.
51 Ibid., p. 544.
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.
30 Ibid., p. 17.
31 Ibid., p. 32.
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.
37 Scott Atran, “A Memory of Lévi-Strauss,” International Cognition and Culture Institute, November 4, 2009, http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=67:scott-atrans-blog&layout=blog&Itemid=34.
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.
10 Ibid., p. 134.
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.
12 Ibid., pp. 155-61.
13 Ibid., p. 163.
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.
17 Ibid., p. 1777.
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.
21 Ibid., p. 153.
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.
38 Claude Lévi-Strauss interview with Philippe Simonnot, “Claude Lévi-Strauss: un anarchiste de droite,” L’Express. http://www.lexpress.fr/informations/archive-claudelevi-strauss-un-anarchiste-de-droite_714140.html.
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.