20 The New York Review
full-bore critique of Jean-Paul Sartre,
perhaps Lévi-Strauss’s last rival for in-
tellectual preeminence, that appeared
in La Pensée Sauvage (1962) as the
final chapter. (The book’s title involved
a pun: pensée means both “thought”
and “pansy,” and an image of the five-
petaled flower adorned the French edi-
tion; it was eventually translated as The
Savage Mind, although Lévi-Strauss’s
title suggestion, Mind in the Wild,
would have been better.) Sartre’s ap-
proach, he said, naively privileged his-
tory—“in Sartre’s system, history plays
exactly the part of a myth”—and was
deeply ethnocentric, wedded to a mis-
guided contrast between modern and
primitive modes of thought, and con-
fined to a laughably parochial range of
phenomena. Many readers found this
attack on Sartre liberating: they saw
structuralism overtaking existentialism
and Marxism as a master discourse,
chrome-clad precision surmounting
Sartre’s smoggy subjectivism.
What felt like a revolution in the
human sciences had swept away the
opposition. Lévi-Strauss had at last
been awarded that chair at the Col-
lège de France, where he would set
up a Laboratory of Social Anthropol-
ogy. Prominent British anthropologists
such as Edmund Leach and Rodney
Needham championed his work in the
English-speaking world. And he was
just getting started on his own Key to
All Mythologies, which took the form
of a four-volume work published as My-
thologiques. Edward Casaubon had his
“Synoptical Tabulations.” Lévi-Strauss
and his assistants sought a higher-tech
approach; he dreamed of computer
punch cards and created mobiles of
paired Möbius strips, graphing myths
in three dimensions.
In the tetralogy’s first installment,
The Raw and the Cooked (1964), he
explored cooking as a negotiation be-
tween nature and culture. (He had
previously introduced the “gusteme,”
the phoneme of food, in Structural
Anthropology.) His analyses here
would be the basis of an equilateral
triangle, soon a staple of textbooks, in
which “Raw” perched at the top ver-
tex, “Cooked” was to its lower left, and
“Rotten” to its lower right. The rela-
tions were mediated, horizontally, by
“fire,” and vertically by the shift to cul-
ture from nature. Nature is to culture
as raw is to cooked. Animals eat their
food raw and are afraid of fire. Rotting
is how nature transforms food; cook-
ing is how culture transforms food. A
critical distinction was made between
roasting (done by men, and involving
no receptacle, therefore more natural,
but also entailing the partial destruc-
tion of the meat) and boiling (done
by women, involving a receptacle, and
more conserving of the meat). A sec-
ond installment was titled From Honey
to Ashes (1966); a great deal was spun
from the notion that honey was “be-
yond raw”; ash (that is, tobacco smoke)
was “beyond cooked.”
Lévi-Strauss had a gift for finding
symmetries, homologies, and inver-
sions wherever he looked. If “birds are
metaphorical human beings and dogs
metonymical human beings, cattle may
be thought of as metonymical inhuman
beings and racehorses as metaphori-
cal inhuman beings,” he had offered
in The Savage Mind. Noticing that
French farmers give their cows names
referring to their coat or their tempera-
ment, as opposed to the human traits
and ranks evoked in dog names, he
concluded that such names “differ from
the names given to dogs in that they are
epithets coming from the syntagmatic
chain, while the latter come from the
paradigmatic series.” (A dog I know
named Rusty would take issue with
this.) In The Origin of Table Manners,
the third installment of Mythologiques,
he argued that while we wear hats and
use forks to keep our heads dry and our
fingers clean, in savage societies good
manners serve to protect the purity of
objects from the grubbiness of man.These formulations felt like insights,
but which could withstand scrutiny?
For more earth-bound anthropolo-
gists—like Leach and Needham, whowere students of Malinowski and
Evans- Pritchard—the issuances of
Lévi-Strauss’s brilliant mind began
to strain credulity. It seemed that the
work, as Dorothea comes to see of
Casaubon’s, “floated among flexible
conjectures.” Lévi-Strauss’s work was
variously roasted and boiled by former
enthusiasts. Needham decided that
Lévi-Strauss was “the greatest Sur-
realist of them all,” hopelessly unreli-
able in his ethnographic references.
Lévi-Strauss on myth was like Freud
on dreams, Leach wrote: “It is all so
neat, it simply must be right. But then
you begin to wonder.”* He had come
to think that Lévi-Strauss would admit
any evidence, however dodgy, so long
as it fit in with his logic, and ignore or
find ways to rule out any evidence that
contradicted it. Others were dismayed
by what they saw as his ahistoricism.
“Lévi-Strauss painted a perfect picture,
of everything fitting into an overarch-
ing scheme,” Alban Bensa, an ethnog-
rapher of New Caledonia, told Patrick
Wilcken. “But when I started going into
the field and seeing the effects of colo-
nialism, I began to have my doubts.”
As the 1960s wore on, structural-
ism started to lose its luster in Paris,
too. Big works of poststructuralism
appeared, treating Lévi-Strauss not as
an authority to be consulted but as a
text to be deconstructed. Seemingly re-
signed to what was happening, he later
offered a gastronomic metaphor: “The
educated public in France,” he said,had fed on structuralism for a while,
but it was “bulimic.” And then Lévi-
Strauss, who retained his Gaullist loy-
alties, was appalled by what he viewed
as the revival of Sartrean sentiments
among the young. In 1967 he told a re-
porter, “I still have the tripe [guts] of a
man of the left. But at my age I know it
is tripe and not brain.”
The French economist and columnist
Guy Sorman wrote that “Lévi-Strauss
never hid the fact that he was a con-
servative (though some preferred not
to know),” and “always rejoiced when
conservatives won elections, whether
in France or in his beloved New York.”
Lévi-Strauss declined to express op-
position to the Vietnam War; his view
of decolonization sounded distinctly
qualified. (He thought that the newstates, intent on modernizing, posed a
greater threat to his “uncivilized so-
cieties” than the colonial ones had.)
Amid the tumult of May ’68, a student
chalked on a blackboard a searing slo-
gan of dismissal: “Structures don’t take
to the streets.”
By 1980, a man whose theory of
kinship revolved around the notion of
“woman as gift” was seeking to block
the election of Marguerite Yourcenar
as the first female member of the
Académie française, les immortels;
Lévi-Strauss, who had been inducted
just seven years earlier, told a friend
direly of certain Amerindian tribes
that would disappear whenever they
“changed something fundamental in
their organization.” This gift had to be
rejected, then, as a matter of survival.
Enlisted in helping set up the Musée du
quai Branly, French president Jacques
Chirac’s reconstitution of the Musée de
l’Homme, Lévi-Strauss brushed aside
those who chastised it for presenting
pilfered indigenous objects out of cul-
tural context: What about the religious
art in the Louvre?
His popular celebrity moved along
separate tracks. He had long been a
presence on French television and
radio, but by the late 1960s he had
appeared on an NBC talk show, been
featured in Vog u e, and discussed in
Playboy. When the magazine Lire con-
ducted a poll in 1980 of who was consid-
ered the most influential contemporary
thinker, Lévi-Strauss came in first.
In his later years, though, he could
not be serene about the fraying of his
powers. “At this great age that I neverimagined reaching, and which is one
of the most curious surprises of my
life, I feel like a shattered hologram,”
he said in 1999, a decade before his
death. “There is a real me, who is but a
quarter or half of a man, and a virtual
me, who still keeps alive an idea of the
whole.” Soon he had the distinction of
being the oldest ever of les immortels.
When he turned one hundred—he’d
live almost another year—President
Nicolas Sarkozy visited him to wish
him happy birthday, celebrations were
held around the world, and the grand
Quai Branly amphitheater was named
for him. The shattered hologram had
entered history and been reassembled,
his life story taking on some of the fea-
tures of myth.
Loyer’s deeply researched biography,
which certainly helps “keep alive an
idea of the whole,” has been rendered
into English perhaps too punctiliously;
one rarely forgets one is reading a
translation. It also steps lightly around
the models and methods that so preoc-
cupied her subject. Most anglophone
readers will be well served by Wilck-
en’s gracefully written, intellectually
assured 2010 biography. Still, Loyer’s
volume is engaging and engaged—en-
gaged, perhaps, to a fault. It sometimes
has the air of a defense attorney’s brief.
When Lévi-Strauss sounds ambivalent
about decolonization, she rushes to
say that his views are consonant with
critiques ventured within postcolonial
studies. When she writes of his unsuc-
cessful effort to keep Yourcenar out of
the Académie, she immediately juxta-
poses it to the fact that he arranged, the
following year, for a woman—his disci-
ple Françoise Héritier—to succeed him
at the Collège de France, something
that Godelier, who was probably the
second-best-known anthropologist in
France, may have had doubts about. Ac-
cording to Loyer, Lévi-Strauss merely
perceived that the Académie “owed its
prestige and vigour to its scrupulous re-
spect for tradition.” Besides, she says,
Yourcenar was then living in Maine.
As it happens, some of Lévi-Strauss’s
most vigorous detractors show us best
how to treasure his legacy. Leach sum-
marized Lévi-Strauss’s mytho-logic
with the judgment: “This is poet’s
country.” Yet in placing him in a camp
with, say, the poet and critic William
Empson, he was voicing affection as
well as disaffection: a and a-1. Lévi-
Strauss, however averse he was to
Evans-Pritchard’s notion that anthro-
pology was finally humanistic and in-
terpretive, was, precisely, an inspired
interpreter, a brilliant reader. And to
situate his scholarship not as an exer-
cise in scientific inquiry but as cultural
work—an emanation both of its time
and of a singular mind—is less relega-
tion than elevation.
When the landmarks of science suc-
ceed in advancing their subject, they
need no longer be consulted: physicists
don’t study Newton; chemists don’t
pore over Lavoisier. Their publications
are subsumed and supplanted by later
installments of scientific inquiry. By
contrast, cultural objects—innervated
by the literary or musical imagination—
ask to be experienced as themselves
and for themselves. That is why, as Haz-
litt observed, “the arts are not progres-
sive.” Every Casaubon is bound to fade
into irrelevance; George Eliot abides.
If some part of Lévi-Strauss’s scholarly
oeuvre survives, it will be because his
scientific aspirations have not. QClaude Lévi-Strauss in Brazil, circa 1936Apic/GettyImages*Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss
(Viking, 1970), p. 57.