Claude Lévi-Strauss

• 1. Introduction

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  Claude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time." Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said he had "broken with an ethnocentric vision of history and humanity." The permanent secretary of the Académie française offered a simpler verdict: "We will not find another like him."

  What had this man done to earn such eulogies? He had spent decades arguing a radical, unsettling idea: that the mind of a so-called "savage" and the mind of a so-called "civilized" person work in exactly the same way. That beneath the bewildering variety of human cultures, the same underlying structures operate everywhere. That myths told by people in the Amazon rainforest and myths told in ancient Greece are, at the deepest level, the same kind of thing.

  To get there, Lévi-Strauss had to escape Nazi-occupied France by boat, watch his mentor die in his arms at a dinner table in New York, and spend years in the Brazilian jungle with communities whose languages he could not speak. His path was strange, and his conclusions were stranger still. What follows is the story of how he built the most ambitious theory of the human mind that the 20th century produced.

• 2. A Portrait Painter's Son

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  Gustave Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908 to French-Jewish parents who had turned agnostic, and his father was there working as a portrait painter. The family returned to Paris, where Claude grew up on a street in the upscale 16th arrondissement named after the artist Claude Lorrain, whose work he admired and would later write about. During the First World War, from age 6 to 10, he lived with his maternal grandfather, the Rabbi of Versailles.

  Despite this religious upbringing, Lévi-Strauss was an atheist or agnostic as an adult. From 1918 to 1925 he studied at Lycée Janson de Sailly, finishing his baccalaureate in June 1925 at age 16. In his final year, 1924, he encountered philosophy for the first time, including the works of Marx and Kant, and began shifting to the political left. He never became a communist, unlike many other socialists of his era.

  From 1925, he spent two years at the prestigious Lycée Condorcet preparing for the entrance exam to the highly selective École normale supérieure. He then decided, for reasons that remain unclear, not to take it. Instead he enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1926, studying law and philosophy while engaging in socialist politics. By 1929 he had abandoned law, which he found boring. In 1931, he passed the agrégation in philosophy, coming in 3rd place, the youngest in his class at 22. The Great Depression had just arrived in France, and he found himself responsible not only for himself but for his parents as well.

• 3. Into the Amazon

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  In 1935, after a few years of secondary school teaching, Lévi-Strauss took a last-minute offer to join a French cultural mission to Brazil. He became a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, and his then-wife Dina served as a visiting professor of ethnology at the same institution.

  The couple lived and conducted anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939. During this period, Claude undertook what would be his only ethnographic fieldwork. He accompanied Dina, a trained ethnographer in her own right, on research expeditions into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon rainforest. They first studied the Guaycuru and Bororó Indian tribes, staying among them for a few days at a time. In 1938, they returned for a second expedition lasting more than half a year to study the Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib societies. Dina developed an eye infection that prevented her from completing the study, and Claude concluded it on his own.

  Edmund Leach later noted, drawing from Lévi-Strauss's own accounts in Tristes Tropiques, that he likely could not have spent more than a few weeks in any single place and was never able to converse easily with his informants in their native languages. This was highly uncharacteristic of standard anthropological methods, which depended on sustained participatory interaction. Yet the experience fixed Lévi-Strauss's professional identity as an anthropologist. Years later, in the 1980s, he reflected on those Amazonian encounters while explaining why he had become vegetarian. In pieces published in the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica and other outlets, he wrote: "A day will come when the thought that to feed themselves, men of the past raised and massacred living beings and complacently exposed their shredded flesh in displays shall no doubt inspire the same repulsion as that of the travellers of the 16th and 17th century facing cannibal meals of savage American primitives."

• 4. Flight and Exile

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  Lévi-Strauss returned to France in 1939 to take part in the war effort and was assigned as a liaison agent to the Maginot Line. After the French capitulation in 1940, he was employed at a lycée in Montpellier. He was then dismissed under Vichy racial laws, because his family, originally from Alsace, was of Jewish ancestry.

  Around the same time, he and his first wife Dina separated. She stayed in France and worked in the resistance, while he escaped Vichy France by boat to Martinique. Victor Serge, the writer and political exile, recorded conversations with Lévi-Strauss aboard the freighter Capitaine Paul-Lemerle on that passage from Marseilles. From Martinique, Lévi-Strauss continued travelling by way of South America and Puerto Rico, where customs agents became suspicious of German letters in his luggage and he was investigated by the FBI.

  In 1941, he was offered a position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He spent most of the war years there and became a founding member, alongside Jacques Maritain, Henri Focillon, and Roman Jakobson, of the École Libre des Hautes Études, a kind of university-in-exile for French academics. His relationship with Jakobson proved decisive. The two are now considered central figures in the founding of structuralist thought.

  He also came into close contact with Franz Boas, the German-educated anthropologist who had shaped the American discipline. In 1942, while having dinner at the Faculty House at Columbia University, Boas died in Lévi-Strauss's arms. This intimate association gave his early work a distinctly American inclination that helped it find acceptance in the United States. After a brief stint from 1946 to 1947 as a cultural attaché to the French embassy in Washington, DC, he returned to Paris in 1948 and received his state doctorate from the Sorbonne, submitting both a major and a minor thesis, as was the French tradition.

• 5. Tristes Tropiques

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  The Elementary Structures of Kinship, one of his two doctoral theses, was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important works on kinship in the history of anthropology. Simone de Beauvoir reviewed it favorably, reading it as an important statement about the position of women in non-Western cultures. Where British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued it was based on the alliance formed when women from one family group married men from another.

  He had grown well known in academic circles through the late 1940s and early 1950s, but in 1955 he became one of France's most celebrated intellectuals with the publication in Paris of Tristes Tropiques by Plon. The organizers of the Prix Goncourt reportedly lamented that they could not award Lévi-Strauss the prize, because Tristes Tropiques was nonfiction. It was a memoir of his years as a French expatriate in the 1930s and of his Amazonian travels, combining what observers described as exquisitely beautiful prose, philosophical meditation, and ethnographic analysis of the Amazonian peoples. The English translation appeared in 1973, published by Penguin.

  In 1959, he was named to the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France. Around the same time he published Structural Anthropology, a collection of essays providing both examples and programmatic statements about structuralism. He also founded the Laboratory for Social Anthropology to train new students, and launched a new journal called l'Homme to publish research results.

• 6. The Savage Mind and Sartre

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  In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published what many consider his most important single work: La Pensée sauvage, translated into English as The Savage Mind and later as Wild Thought. The French title resists translation cleanly, since pensée means both "thought" and "pansy," and sauvage carries a range of meanings not fully captured by the English word "savage." Lévi-Strauss himself reportedly suggested the English title be Pansies for Thought, borrowing from a speech by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V. French editions are often printed with an image of wild pansies on the cover.

  The book addressed not just "primitive" thought but forms of thought common to all human beings. Its first half laid out his theory of culture and mind; its second half extended this into a theory of history and social change. That second part drew Lévi-Strauss into a heated public debate with Jean-Paul Sartre over the nature of human freedom. Sartre's existentialist philosophy held that human beings were fundamentally free to act as they chose, while his leftism simultaneously committed him to the view that individuals were constrained by ideologies imposed by the powerful. Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist account of agency as a direct counter. Echoes of this debate between structuralism and existentialism eventually inspired younger scholars, including Pierre Bourdieu.

  In the same book, Lévi-Strauss developed the contrast between the Bricoleur and the Engineer. The word bricoleur, derived from an old French verb originally referring to extraneous movements in ball games, billiards, hunting, shooting, and riding, had come to mean doing and repairing things with whatever materials and tools are already at hand. The Bricoleur, Lévi-Strauss argued, approximates the "savage mind": adaptive, working within a closed universe of available materials. The Engineer approximates the scientific mind: conceiving projects in their entirety and creating new tools as needed. Both, however, are ultimately constrained by reality.

• 7. Mythologiques

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  By the mid-1960s, Lévi-Strauss had become a worldwide celebrity, and he spent the second half of that decade working on his most ambitious undertaking: a four-volume study called Mythologiques. He traced a single myth from the tip of South America through all of its variations as it moved group by group north through Central America and eventually into the Arctic Circle, mapping the cultural evolution of that myth across the entire Western Hemisphere.

  He examined the underlying structure of relationships among the story's elements rather than focusing on the content of the story itself. The final volume appeared in 1971. Richly detailed and extremely long, Mythologiques is less widely read than the shorter and more accessible Savage Mind, despite its position as Lévi-Strauss's most sustained example of structuralist analysis.

  On the 14th of May 1973, he was elected to the Académie française, France's highest honour for a writer. He was already a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1956), the American Philosophical Society (since 1960), and the United States National Academy of Sciences (since 1967). That same year, 1973, he received the Erasmus Prize. He also held honorary doctorates from Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, and was a recipient of the Grand-croix de la Légion d'honneur. He won the 1986 International Nonino Prize in Italy and the Meister-Eckhart-Prize for philosophy in 2003. In 2008, he became the first member of the Académie française to reach the age of 100, and one of the few living authors to have work published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. On the death of Maurice Druon on the 14th of April 2009, he became the dean of the Académie, its longest-serving member.

• 8. The Structure of Myth

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  Lévi-Strauss's theory of myth grew directly from his broader structuralist framework. He identified myths as a type of speech through which an underlying language could be discovered. He believed there was no single "authentic" version of any myth; every telling was one manifestation of the same deep structure. The fundamental unit he isolated was the mytheme: a sentence expressing a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were grouped together as mythemes.

  What he believed he found within the relations among mythemes was a consistent logic: myths consist of juxtaposed binary oppositions. In the Oedipus myth, for example, he identified the overrating and underrating of blood relations, the autochthonous origin of humans, and the denial of that origin. Influenced by Hegel, he argued that the human mind thinks fundamentally in these binary oppositions and their unification, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, and that this structure is what makes meaning possible.

  His analysis of the Native American trickster figure showed the method in action. The trickster is almost always a raven or a coyote. Both animals eat carrion, placing them halfway between herbivores and beasts of prey. The opposition between herbivores and beasts of prey is, in his reading, analogous to the opposition between life and death. The raven and coyote mediate that opposition, and their ambiguous, contradictory mythological personalities reflect exactly this mediating role: "The trickster is a mediator. Since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality."

  Critics were pointed. Stanley Diamond argued that Lévi-Strauss had worked backward from assumed conclusions rather than building up inductively from evidence, and noted that coyotes hunt as well as scavenge, complicating the neat category. Edmund Leach wrote that Lévi-Strauss's work was "difficult to understand" and combined "baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition," adding that some readers suspected a confidence trick. Sociologist Stanislav Andreski argued that much of the mystique came from Lévi-Strauss's use of quasi-algebraic equations, which Andreski described as "threatening people with mathematics." Despite this, the Oedipus analysis and the trickster framework remained foundational texts in 20th-century cultural theory, and the journal l'Homme, which Lévi-Strauss founded, continued to publish the structural anthropology research he had built an entire discipline to support.