COMMENT  |
| Claude Lévi-Strauss |
That introductory passage to his book Tristes Tropiques , translated as “A World on the Wane”, could have been the dismissive wave towards amateurs of a lofty intellectual giant, a man who helped define modern anthropology and not only spanned but symbolised the 20th century.
But the work – published in 1955, almost halfway through his remarkable 100-year life – was more subtle and revealing. It was beautifully written, causing the prestigious French Goncourt literary committee to regret that as non-fiction, they could not award it a prize.
It was premonitory, concerned about disappearing tribes, which he argued were far from “primitive”, and a warning of the dangers of ecological disaster linked to population growth and over-consumption.
Most paradoxically, it described his own distaste for adventure, which he likened to military service, full of wasted time, hunger, exhaustion, illness and struggle. “The truths that we travel so far to seek are of value only when we have scraped them clean of all this fungus,” he argued.
The structuralism he developed suggested our perceptions of the world and our actions in it are shaped by universal underlying structures, which combine to form models – sometimes accurate, sometimes not. By extending Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics into anthropology, Lévi-Strauss set the stage for the widespread adoption of structuralism by sociologists and literary theorists in the 1970s, and on into architecture and the broader social sciences.
True to form, after research in Brazil in the 1930s, he spent little time in the field – a point of criticism from others who questioned his mastery of local languages or understanding. He was more content among the tribes of academe, buried in the jungles of libraries culling material for books including his four-part masterpiece on myths and La Pensée Sauvage , the savage mind.
What drove him – in copious and at times almost impenetrable academic writing – was theory, through which he sought to elevate anthropology from story into science. He saw the near-ubiquitous taboo on incest as one example of his universal underlying structures.
“Claude Lévi-Strauss is without doubt the anthropologist whose work had the greatest influence in the 20th century,” wrote Philippe Descola, his one-time student and successor as chair of anthropology at the Collège de France, in a tribute last year which stressed the importance of “his three mistresses: Freud, Marx and geology”.
Born in 1908 in Brussels into a lapsed Jewish French family (he later said he would surreptitiously munch ham sandwiches), Lévi-Strauss was brought up in Paris.
His father was an artist, and he himself was just as passionate about music, which inspired his writings, the interplay of instruments in the orchestra in harmony with his structuralism. He once said he would have sacrificed 10 years of his life to be a conductor like his great-grandfather.
He quickly became disillusioned with the “mental gymnastics” of his philosophy studies at the Sorbonne, and would change focus, jobs and even – three times – wives, by whom he had two sons.
After a brief period as a school teacher, he began lecturing in sociology in 1935 at the recently established University of São Paulo, from where he embarked on ethnographic research.
Back in France in 1939, he lost his teaching job under Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws, and was rescued and brought to New York by a Rockefeller Foundation programme in 1941. He taught at the New School for Social Research, helped found the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, and was briefly a Washington cultural attaché.
“Everything I know I learnt in the US,” he said later, although he was inspired by many fellow European exiles. They included surrealist André Breton and the linguist Roman Jakobson, who introduced him to the writings of de Saussure.
On his return home, Lévi-Strauss built a career that contributed not only to anthropological thought but also its institutions. He helped run the Musée de l’Homme and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and founded the journal l’Homme.
Françoise Héritier, an honorary professor at the Collège, said recently: “He had an unusual way of greeting his visitors, holding them by the hand to lead them to the deep and somewhat dilapidated leather armchairs, which it was difficult to get out of.” Many recall a reserved man, helpful but rigorous and never shy to defend his views. He preferred seminars and lectures to private discussion, and few dared address him by the informal French “tu”.
He had a long and at times fraught relationship with Unesco, the United Nations’ culture arm. He supported its mission in his 1951 book Race and History, arguing for the need to tackle racism, but in 1971 he suggested that cultural exchanges risked destroying diversity.
In later life, he became a cultural icon sought out by successive French presidents, from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to Nicolas Sarkozy.
As someone who relished esoteric rituals, he looked content preening himself on French television as he was fitted with the ancient garb of the Académie Française on his election in 1973.
But as he concluded in Tristes Tropiques: “The institutions, manners and customs which I shall have spent my life in cataloguing and trying to understand are an ephemeral efflorescence.”
