Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (33 page)
Read Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory Online
Authors: Patrick Wilcken
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Professionals & Academics, #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #History, #Americas, #South America, #Brazil, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural
BOOK: Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory
4.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The upside was the fresh but slightly disorganized feel of stream-of-consciousness typing that still makes the book an infectious read. The central narrative—Lévi-Strauss’s formation as an anthropologist, his posting in São Paulo and subsequent fieldwork in Mato Grosso—is constantly interrupted by pages on the idea of travel and travel writing, modernity’s depressing uniformity, man’s impact on his environment, the relative merits of world cities and religions. Sections of his aborted novel, the ideas for the play
L’Apothéose d’Auguste
, penned in desperation during a lull in fieldwork, stanzas of poetry that came to him in the Amazon, and thoughts on music crop up at intervals. At times the reader feels as if he is in a lecture theater, at others lumbering across the dusty savannah or tramping through the mulch of a tropical forest. By the end, as Lévi-Strauss takes on Islam, compares Buddhism to Marxism and muses on the ultimate futility of our quest for meaning, the reader seems to be inside Lévi-Strauss’s head.
L’Apothéose d’Auguste
, penned in desperation during a lull in fieldwork, stanzas of poetry that came to him in the Amazon, and thoughts on music crop up at intervals. At times the reader feels as if he is in a lecture theater, at others lumbering across the dusty savannah or tramping through the mulch of a tropical forest. By the end, as Lévi-Strauss takes on Islam, compares Buddhism to Marxism and muses on the ultimate futility of our quest for meaning, the reader seems to be inside Lévi-Strauss’s head.
“
Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs
” (I hate traveling and explorers)—that first, posturing, deliberately provocative sentence announced the arrival of a new voice on the Parisian scene. The opening pages of
Tristes Tropiques
are a full-throttle rant against the whole genre of travel writing and the midcentury explorers and adventurers who entertained Parisian high society. For Lévi-Strauss they were frauds, evoking an exoticism that had long since disappeared, peddling stale genre prose like: “At five thirty in the morning, we entered the harbour at Recife amid the shrill cry of gulls, while a fleet of boats laden with tropical fruits clustered around the hull.” The anthropologist, on the other hand, traveled only because he had to, wasting precious time hunting for truths—the myths, rituals or kin structures—that were hidden in the far-flung reaches of the world. The story of his adventures was merely “dross” obscuring his more scholarly findings.
13
Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs
” (I hate traveling and explorers)—that first, posturing, deliberately provocative sentence announced the arrival of a new voice on the Parisian scene. The opening pages of
Tristes Tropiques
are a full-throttle rant against the whole genre of travel writing and the midcentury explorers and adventurers who entertained Parisian high society. For Lévi-Strauss they were frauds, evoking an exoticism that had long since disappeared, peddling stale genre prose like: “At five thirty in the morning, we entered the harbour at Recife amid the shrill cry of gulls, while a fleet of boats laden with tropical fruits clustered around the hull.” The anthropologist, on the other hand, traveled only because he had to, wasting precious time hunting for truths—the myths, rituals or kin structures—that were hidden in the far-flung reaches of the world. The story of his adventures was merely “dross” obscuring his more scholarly findings.
13
Yet at the same time,
Tristes Tropiques
is itself unquestionably a travel book of sorts, even as it parodies the genre. Perhaps there was an element of sly self-criticism in Lévi-Strauss’s hierarchy between the anthropologist and the so-called explorer. We know from letters to the German anthropologist Nimuendajú that at times Lévi-Strauss felt like little more than a casual day-tripper himself: “I know absolutely nothing about the social organization of the Kaingang,” he wrote in one. “I met them on what was in effect a tourist expedition, with no scope at all for work.”
14
Even his longer expeditions have the weightless, itinerant feel of the explorer’s restlessness that he excoriates in the first chapter of
Tristes Tropiques
. The sense of being constantly on the move, the descriptions of the rapidly changing environment and the mishaps—the herder Emídio’s mutilated hand, Lévi-Strauss’s own experiences of being lost on the savannah, the eye infection—are the staples of adventurers’ tales.
Tristes Tropiques
is itself unquestionably a travel book of sorts, even as it parodies the genre. Perhaps there was an element of sly self-criticism in Lévi-Strauss’s hierarchy between the anthropologist and the so-called explorer. We know from letters to the German anthropologist Nimuendajú that at times Lévi-Strauss felt like little more than a casual day-tripper himself: “I know absolutely nothing about the social organization of the Kaingang,” he wrote in one. “I met them on what was in effect a tourist expedition, with no scope at all for work.”
14
Even his longer expeditions have the weightless, itinerant feel of the explorer’s restlessness that he excoriates in the first chapter of
Tristes Tropiques
. The sense of being constantly on the move, the descriptions of the rapidly changing environment and the mishaps—the herder Emídio’s mutilated hand, Lévi-Strauss’s own experiences of being lost on the savannah, the eye infection—are the staples of adventurers’ tales.
In fact,
Tristes Tropiques
was a clever combination of travel writing and ethnography. One leavened the other in what was, after
L’Afrique fantôme
, Leiris’s candid journal of his participation in Griaule’s Dakar- Djibouti expedition, the first behind-the-scenes account of being an anthropologist. The ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss explained in an interview given following the book’s publication,
Tristes Tropiques
was a clever combination of travel writing and ethnography. One leavened the other in what was, after
L’Afrique fantôme
, Leiris’s candid journal of his participation in Griaule’s Dakar- Djibouti expedition, the first behind-the-scenes account of being an anthropologist. The ethnographer, Lévi-Strauss explained in an interview given following the book’s publication,
is like a photographer, condemned to use a telephoto lens; he only sees the natives, and he sees them in the minutest detail. Without renouncing all that, I wanted to enlarge the field, to admit the landscape, the non-primitive populations, the ethnologist himself at work or doubting, questioning himself about his profession.
15
Like Leiris, Lévi-Strauss described the boredom and the uncertainties of the fieldwork experience, the false promises of the exotic and the realities of colonial frontiers. At the same time,
Tristes Tropiques
was hardly a wide-angled shot. What was missing were the others—Dina, Vellard and Castro Faria barely rate a mention; the drivers, the herders, the missionaries and the canoeists appear only fleetingly in what is often a more intimate drama between the anthropologist and “the savage.” Sometimes it is as if Lévi-Strauss is alone in the field, communing with his informants, winkling out the secrets of their cultures.
Tristes Tropiques
was hardly a wide-angled shot. What was missing were the others—Dina, Vellard and Castro Faria barely rate a mention; the drivers, the herders, the missionaries and the canoeists appear only fleetingly in what is often a more intimate drama between the anthropologist and “the savage.” Sometimes it is as if Lévi-Strauss is alone in the field, communing with his informants, winkling out the secrets of their cultures.
The book has nevertheless become a landmark in anthropology. It was one of the first to blend confessional literature and ethnography, in what would become known as “reflexive” ethnography, a genre that would blossom from the 1960s onward. The impossibility of absolute objectivity in any scientific enterprise, acutely felt in the social sciences, brought ethnographers face-to-face with a philosophical dilemma, something that Lévi-Strauss grasped only after the fact. Again resorting to the camera lens analogy, he put a positive spin on a book that he had once seen as a distraction from his academic research:
In retrospect, I must admit that in
Tristes Tropiques
there is a certain scientific truth which is perhaps greater than in our objective works because what I did was to reintegrate the observer into the object of his observation. It’s a book written with a lens that’s called a fish-eye, I think . . . It shows not only what is in front of the camera but also what is behind the camera. And so, it is not an objective view of my ethnological experiences, it’s a look at myself living these experiences.
16
A slow-burning pessimism, a lament at the progressive loss of our links—sensual, intellectual and cultural—to the world around us pervades the book. Its pathos caught the postwar mood perfectly, particularly in France. For Lévi-Strauss, globalization was creating a bleak world of architectural and cultural uniformity. Polynesian islands, once idylls of natural beauty, were being concreted over, while Asia’s delicate network of local cultures was turning into vast gray suburbs. A world that from today’s perspective seems relatively untouched was already sensing that the circle was closing. Man was soiling his own nest. “The first thing we see when we travel around the world,” Lévi-Strauss wrote in despair, “is our own filth, thrown into the face of humanity.”
17
17
Anthropologists were but another aspect of Western expansion, their very presence a sign that the rot had already set in. By the time Lévi-Strauss’s team had reached the Nambikwara, they were already cooking their meals in rusty jerry cans dumped by local motorboat operators. (Look closely at Lévi-Strauss’s photographs of the Nambikwara and, in among the bows and arrows, gourds and woven baskets, there is also an assortment of smaller tins, planks of wood, bottles and enamel plates.)
18
Lévi-Strauss found himself “caught within a circle from which there is no escape.” Centuries before, in a more diverse, culturally atomized world, travelers were exposed to untold riches, but through ignorance responded with indifference or active prejudice. Now, just as greater contact and interpenetration have opened these worlds up to us, they are disintegrating before our eyes, like parchments turning to dust in our hands.
18
Lévi-Strauss found himself “caught within a circle from which there is no escape.” Centuries before, in a more diverse, culturally atomized world, travelers were exposed to untold riches, but through ignorance responded with indifference or active prejudice. Now, just as greater contact and interpenetration have opened these worlds up to us, they are disintegrating before our eyes, like parchments turning to dust in our hands.
More than a philosophy or a worldview, a whole style of thought was on display in
Tristes Tropiques
with Lévi-Strauss’s trademark fascination with symmetry and inversion
.
The Buddhist sage and the Muslim prophet are polar opposites: “One is chaste, the other is potent, with four wives; one is androgynous, the other bearded, one peaceable, the other bellicose, one exemplary and the other messianic.”
19
Traveling from Europe to Brazil involved a threefold mutation—from the Old to the New World, from the northern to the southern hemisphere, from a temperate to a tropical climate; from being poor, he had become rich, prompting his transformation from the disciplined and thrifty to the spontaneous and profligate. A curious meal in the bush town of Rosário at the outset of the Serra do Norte expedition apparently consisted of half a chicken roasted and half cold; half a fish fried and the other half boiled.
20
Lévi-Strauss’s mind was constantly fitting his experiences into geometric models, with axes, dimensions and inverse relationships. In
Tristes Tropiques
this comes across as a stylistic tic; in his more academic writings it was already becoming synonymous with structuralism as a method.
Tristes Tropiques
with Lévi-Strauss’s trademark fascination with symmetry and inversion
.
The Buddhist sage and the Muslim prophet are polar opposites: “One is chaste, the other is potent, with four wives; one is androgynous, the other bearded, one peaceable, the other bellicose, one exemplary and the other messianic.”
19
Traveling from Europe to Brazil involved a threefold mutation—from the Old to the New World, from the northern to the southern hemisphere, from a temperate to a tropical climate; from being poor, he had become rich, prompting his transformation from the disciplined and thrifty to the spontaneous and profligate. A curious meal in the bush town of Rosário at the outset of the Serra do Norte expedition apparently consisted of half a chicken roasted and half cold; half a fish fried and the other half boiled.
20
Lévi-Strauss’s mind was constantly fitting his experiences into geometric models, with axes, dimensions and inverse relationships. In
Tristes Tropiques
this comes across as a stylistic tic; in his more academic writings it was already becoming synonymous with structuralism as a method.
At the core of
Tristes Tropiques
was ethnography. Although many of the sections on the Nambikwara and the Bororo were reworkings of old material, the chapter on the Caduveo was a creative reinterpretation of what he’d seen on the Brazil-Paraguay borderlands fifteen years earlier. Casting his mind back to the Caduveo women and their strange arabesques, the interlocking designs that weaved across their necks and faces, Lévi-Strauss likened them to the playing-card characters in Lewis Car-roll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Like cards in a deck, the Caduveo patterns were characterized by similarity and difference, symmetry and asymmetry. It was a “hall of mirrors” effect—the inverted scrolls and arabesques refracting along axes, line playing off surface, angle contrasting with curve, pattern with background.
Tristes Tropiques
was ethnography. Although many of the sections on the Nambikwara and the Bororo were reworkings of old material, the chapter on the Caduveo was a creative reinterpretation of what he’d seen on the Brazil-Paraguay borderlands fifteen years earlier. Casting his mind back to the Caduveo women and their strange arabesques, the interlocking designs that weaved across their necks and faces, Lévi-Strauss likened them to the playing-card characters in Lewis Car-roll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Like cards in a deck, the Caduveo patterns were characterized by similarity and difference, symmetry and asymmetry. It was a “hall of mirrors” effect—the inverted scrolls and arabesques refracting along axes, line playing off surface, angle contrasting with curve, pattern with background.
For Lévi-Strauss, these designs were not merely aesthetic inventions, passed down and perfected through the generations. They were subconscious meditations on structures found in traditional Caduveo social organization. This culture, a highly stratified system of intermarrying castes, which Lévi-Strauss compared to medieval European society, was in mourning for the loss of reciprocity to hierarchy, solidarity to division. The fissures and contradictions of their rigid social systems found expression in the subtle imbalances of the designs’ alternating motifs. Caduveo art was in the last instance “a phantasm of society” expressing, at a subconscious level, the unease, the anxieties, the conflicts involved in being Caduveo.
21
21
At the end of this strange yet somehow compelling analysis, Lévi-Strauss went one step further: parallels could be drawn between the formal properties of Caduveo art and Bororo hut plans. Although less dysfunctional than the Caduveo, the Bororo system had its own partially unresolved contradictions. It too was at once balanced and unstable, with its complicated combination of dual and tripartite social groupings. Lévi-Strauss’s broader theoretical point was that structural echoes could be found in many aspects of social and cultural life—art, metaphysics, social systems, even the positioning of huts in a village. Again and again the human mind threw up similar relationships across domains that at first glance seemed completely unconnected.
What had previously been expressed in the hard-to-follow language of structural linguistics and technical kinship analysis had found its poetic expression. Shorn of their academic overlay, the ideas had a simple appeal.
Tristes Tropiques
hinted at a panhuman bond, even as it distanced Western thought from the output of indigenous cultures around the world. It showed indigenous culture in a new light, as creative but systematized, idiosyncratic yet ultimately of a piece.
Tristes Tropiques
hinted at a panhuman bond, even as it distanced Western thought from the output of indigenous cultures around the world. It showed indigenous culture in a new light, as creative but systematized, idiosyncratic yet ultimately of a piece.
DURING 1955
TRISTES TROPIQUES
was unveiled to the public. A fifty-page extract first appeared in
Les Temps modernes
in August as “Des Indiens et leur ethnographe” (Indians and Their Ethnographer).
22
Taken from the middle of the book, the selection opened with a manifesto of the structuralist outlook:
TRISTES TROPIQUES
was unveiled to the public. A fifty-page extract first appeared in
Les Temps modernes
in August as “Des Indiens et leur ethnographe” (Indians and Their Ethnographer).
22
Taken from the middle of the book, the selection opened with a manifesto of the structuralist outlook:
The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems. I am of the opinion that the number of such systems is not unlimited and that—in their games, dreams or wild imaginings—human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repertoire that it should be possible to define. By making an inventory of all recorded customs . . . one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements . . .
23
Systems over individuals; instinct over creativity—this was hardly the kind of philosophical orientation likely to appeal to the journal’s editors, among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In the book itself, which appeared in October, Lévi-Strauss was more direct, taking calculated jabs at existentialism and the prevailing subjectivist philosophical mood. Existentialism’s “overindulgent attitude towards the illusions of subjectivity,” wrote Lévi-Strauss, reduced philosophy to “shopgirl metaphysics” (
métaphysique pour midinette
).
24
The core problem, as he saw it, was “understanding being in relationship to itself, not in relationship to oneself ”—that is to say, mapping how facts in the world relate to one another rather than trying to grasp their particular import for us, how we perceive them or what we see as their significance. For Lévi-Strauss, existentialism agonized over the very material that should be filleted out and discarded. Even so, Sartre apparently liked
Tristes Tropiques
for the confessional intimacy of Lévi-Strauss’s warts-and-all descriptions of fieldwork—what he saw as the revelation of the observer in the act of observing.
25
métaphysique pour midinette
).
24
The core problem, as he saw it, was “understanding being in relationship to itself, not in relationship to oneself ”—that is to say, mapping how facts in the world relate to one another rather than trying to grasp their particular import for us, how we perceive them or what we see as their significance. For Lévi-Strauss, existentialism agonized over the very material that should be filleted out and discarded. Even so, Sartre apparently liked
Tristes Tropiques
for the confessional intimacy of Lévi-Strauss’s warts-and-all descriptions of fieldwork—what he saw as the revelation of the observer in the act of observing.
25
Indeed, it was precisely Lévi-Strauss’s grappling with his own “illusions of subjectivity” that made the book an unqualified success with the critics when it appeared in print in the autumn. The genre-bending mix of confessional, travelogue, philosophy and science brought forward comparisons to the great innovators of the past. Raymond Aron, writing in
Le Figaro
, likened
Tristes Tropiques
to Montesquieu’s satirical epistolary novel
Lettres Persanes
(
Persian Letters
);
Combat
compared Lévi-Strauss to his boyhood hero Cervantes; while for the writer and critic François-Régis Bastide, Lévi-Strauss was the new Chateaubriand.
26
Le Figaro
, likened
Tristes Tropiques
to Montesquieu’s satirical epistolary novel
Lettres Persanes
(
Persian Letters
);
Combat
compared Lévi-Strauss to his boyhood hero Cervantes; while for the writer and critic François-Régis Bastide, Lévi-Strauss was the new Chateaubriand.
26
Other books
The Long Ride by Bonnie Bryant
The First Technomancer by Rodney C. Johnson
Bad In Boots 02 - Ty's Temptation by Patrice Michelle
Until I Found You by Bylin, Victoria
Hear No (Hidden Evil, #1) by Ford, Lizzy
Winter's Bees by E. E. Ottoman
Lethal Seasons (A Changed World Book 1) by Alice Sabo
Florence Gordon by Brian Morton
The Fifth House of the Heart by Ben Tripp
Leading Lady by Lawana Blackwell
