18 The New York Review
The Key to All Mythologies
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Lévi-Strauss: A Biography
by Emmanuelle Loyer,
translated from the French by Ninon
Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff.
Polity, 744 pp., $45.
Claude Lévi-Strauss:
A Critical Study of His Thought
by Maurice Godelier, translated
from the French by Nora Scott.
Verso, 540 pp., $44.95 (paper)
In 1937 Claude Lévi-Strauss, a twenty-
nine-year-old aspiring anthropologist,
decided that the time had come to do
his fieldwork—a rite of passage for
his intended profession. Bronisław
Malinowski, Polish-born and British-
trained, had established the model, set-
tling by himself for several years among
the Trobriand Islanders during World
War I and publishing a book about them
that braided together observation and
theory. A decade later, Edward Evans-
Pritchard spent nearly two years on his
own among the Azande of the upper
Nile, producing a richly observed book
that profoundly influenced philosophi-
cal work on epistemology and scientific
explanation. Lévi-Strauss set his sights
on the Nambikwara tribes of Mato
Grosso, a vast expanse of western Bra-
zil. But he would do things differently.
He decided that a proper foray into
the realm of the non-civilisé, spread
over thousands of square miles, would
require a research team—it included
his wife, Dina, whose academic train-
ing was similar to his, and a naturalist-
physician, J. A. Vellard—and plenty
of heavy equipment. He assembled
twenty men, fifteen mules, and some
thirty oxen, along with guns and three
thousand rounds of ammunition. For-
get the immersions of Malinowski; this
was an expedition in the style of Sir
Richard Burton and John Speke, per-
haps even of Fitzcarraldo.
As Emmanuelle Loyer, a professor
of contemporary history at Sciences
Po, notes in her long and lively biogra-
phy of Lévi-Strauss, “the ‘visitors’ were
often to outnumber the visited Indi-
ans.” The team, mindful of menaces,
never stayed anywhere for long. In a
letter to a friend in São Paulo, Lévi-
Strauss reported:
I am writing to you in the midst of
fifteen men, women and children
who are stark naked (but that’s a
shame since their bodies are not
beautiful), with an extremely wel-
coming nature given that they are
the same group (and probably the
same individuals) who had slaugh-
tered a Protestant mission in Juru-
ena five years ago.At one point, Vellard decided to test
the curare in which the Nambikwara
dipped their arrows by jabbing the
stuff into a dog, and watched it die of
asphyxia. Dina, in her diaries (which
Loyer quotes to good effect), wrote
acidly, “I am not prepared to die and
I wish to return from this adventure.
Otherwise, it will no longer be an
adventure.”
And “adventure” does seem the mot
juste. It was certainly a long way from
any of the worlds Lévi-Strauss had
known. He came from an Alsatian-
Jewish family and grew up in a largely
secular household, although he was bar
mitzvahed to appease a rabbi grand-
father. His father was a painter in a
Beaux-Arts style that was growing
steadily less fashionable; Loyer de-
scribes the family as “downwardly mo-
bile bourgeoisie.” Lévi-Strauss earned
a double degree in law and philosophy
at the Sorbonne and in 1931 took the
agrégation exam in philosophy, a nec-
essary credential for a teaching career.
Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in
1932, had also studied philosophy at
the Sorbonne and was a fellow agregé.
Both ended up teaching at provincial
lycées but retained a keen intellectual
appetite. Lévi-Strauss’s own “intel-
lectual mistresses,” he avowed, were
Marx, Freud, and geology. Around
1933 he read Primitive Society by
Robert Lowie and decided that an-
thropology might bring together his
various interests. He devoured the
ethnographic canon, including Ma-
linowski, James Frazer, Marcel Mauss,
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Franz
Boas. Still, lacking formal training in
the field, he had no obvious route out
of the life of a lycée instructor. The
reason Lévi-Strauss ended up in Brazil
was that the only decent academic posi-tion on offer was at the newly created
University of São Paulo.
His ethnographic excursions in Bra-
zil were distinctly haphazard. He’d
made an earlier visit to the Bororo, for
instance, in large part because his fish-
erman guide wanted tobacco and knew
that they grew it. As his heavily armed
caravan creaked through Mato Grosso,
his visits to the Indian villages were
not only brief—it was ethnography as
speed dating—but highly mediated. He
did not speak the indigenous tongues;
he wasn’t even fluent in Portuguese.
The interviews typically involved a
Portuguese-speaking villager whose
remarks someone else would translate
into French. Lévi-Strauss, however,
was unabashed. He spent four days
with the Mundé and came away with
views about their kinship system and
vocabulary. This ferocious autodidact,
one senses, would slot his schemas
wherever they would stick.
After six months of careering from
one village to another, the adventure
was over. It was not just his first serious
foray into the field; it was also his last.
(He was to write later, in the famous
first sentence of Tristes Tropiques, his
most famous book, “I hate traveling
and explorers.”) As a previous biog-
rapher, Patrick Wilcken, observed inClaude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the
Laboratory (2010), “by the 1950s no se-
rious anthropologist could have gotten
away with such a whimsical journey.”
Lévi-Strauss himself had few illusions
about where his skills and interests lay:
“I realized early on that I was a library
man, not a fieldworker.” In the French-
man’s own terms, one could say that
Evans-Pritchard’s approach to ethnog-
raphy was to Lévi-Strauss’s as the raw
is to the cooked.Returning to Paris in the spring of
1939, Lévi-Strauss installed himself at
the Musée de l’Homme, preparing to
exhibit some of the hundreds of objects
he had collected from his South Ameri-
can informants. He also broke up with
his wife and started (but did not fin-
ish) a novel, which involved Pacific Is-
landers fooled by a phonograph into
thinking that their gods had returned.
Working title: Tristes Tropiques.
As for the looming Nazi threat, his
vaguely Marxist analysis inclined him
to think it was a passing storm, a mat-
ter, as he explained to a friend, of “the
jealousy felt by the German middle-
classes towards the Jews who have
managed to thrive during the period of
inflation.” He was called up when the
war broke out and after France sur-
rendered in June 1940 found himself in
Montpellier. Hoping to take up a more
prestigious teaching position in Paris,
he went to Vichy to get authorization to
return. Later, he recalled, “The official
in charge looked at me, dumbfounded:
‘With a name like yours, to Paris? You
can’t be serious!’ It was only then that
I began to understand.” As with his
ethnographic encounters, Lévi-Strauss
was inclined to favor his models, his
analyses, over the messy exigencies of
fact.
Finally, in 1941, he secured a visa to
America—the necessary job offer had
been extended by the New School for
Social Research, a haven for European
academic refugees—and after an ar-
duous passage arrived in New York.
At the New School he had to be styled
“Claude L. Strauss,” lest students think
of the jeans maker. He also found his
way to French government-in-exile
groups, pledging fealty to General de
Gaulle. But his time in New York was
far more than sanctuary, because it
was here that he formed a life-altering
friendship with a fellow refugee named
Roman Jakobson—a Russian linguist,
polymath, and bon vivant.
Jakobson was also a structuralist:
he had mastered the work of a then
little-known Swiss linguist, Ferdinand
de Saussure (1857–1913), extracted a
handful of core ideas, and seen what
could be done with them. Among these
ideas was the distinction between lan-
guage, conceived as an abstract system,
and speech, taken as particular utter-
ances. Another concerned the way
“signs” signified. Take the phoneme,
the smallest meaningful unit of linguis-
tic sound: a phoneme was significant
only in differentiating a word that had it
from one that had another (say, “coat”
from “goat”). A third idea was about
the relations among such entities: they
could be substitutes for one another.Claude Lévi-Strauss in his office in Paris, 1969Martine^ Frank/MagnumPhotos