In his heated objection to Lévi-Strauss’s praise of the
Nambikwara, Derrida may also be giving vent to a resentment
of Lévi-Strauss’s considerable novelistic talent, his fluent abil-
ity to write an “empirical account.”Tristes Tropiquesis marked
by virtuosic passages of description, notably in the section
“Crowds,” derived from Lévi-Strauss’s experience in Calcutta.
Here Lévi-Strauss does reveal himself as a disciple of Rous-
seau; he prefers the countryside to the urban uproar. But
he retains a perverse appreciation of city decadence. When
he evokes the packed street life of India, he shows considerable
mimetic flair: “Every time I emerged from my hotel in Cal-
cutta, which was besieged by cows and had vultures perched
on its windowsills, I became the central figure in a ballet... a
shoeblack flung himself at my feet; a small boy rushed up
to me, whining ‘One anna, papa, one anna!’; a cripple dis-
played his stumps, having bared himself to give a better view;
a pander—‘British girls, very nice... ’; a clarinet-seller.. .”^2 As
a stylist, he does everything that Derrida does not: he writes
economical, memorable sentences anchored in factual details.
Such realism as Lévi-Strauss’s presents a disciplinary threat to
Derrida. He wishes to ward offthe possibility that the anthro-
pologists, nurtured by mere empirical observation, might rival
the philosophers.
Along with his objection to Lévi-Strauss’s empirical tactics,
Derrida criticizes his remarks about writing. Derrida admits that
Lévi-Strauss’s connection between writing and social hierarchy
(and, therefore, violence against the lower orders) is histori-
cally warranted. The first large urban civilizations—Babylon,
Egypt—used writing as an elite mechanism for social control.
The secrets of the realm remained in the hands of the few who
had knowledge of script.
Derrida, then, concedes Lévi-Strauss’s point that the
90 Writing and DifferenceandOf Grammatology