A MEETING WITH LĂVI-STRAUSS
Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. One of his many achievements has been to place anthropology at the heart of the evolution of contemporary French thought. He set about systematically putting into place, from the ground up, entire new systems for explaining humanity to itself. In effect, he reinvented modern anthropology.
During the 1950s and 60s, LĂ©vi-Straussâs name became associated with a movement known as structuralism which was to influence the entire spectrum of disciplines that makes up the human sciences.
On a snowy afternoon, 19 November 1996, the author of this book interviewed Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss at the CollĂšge de France in Paris.
LĂ©vi-Strauss has elaborated new theories in nearly all the key domains of anthropology. In doing so, he has also put into place a general theory of culture which emphasizes the importance of hidden structures, analogous to a kind of syntax, operating behind the scenes.
The origins of LĂ©vi-Straussâs thought lie ultimately in the rainswept forests of the South American continent, home to the Caduveo, the Bororo and the Nambikwara. It was there that his encounter with âprimitiveâ man first took place.
Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss was born in Brussels in 1908. He was brought up in Parisâs 16th arrondissement (where he still lives today) in a street named after the artist Nicolas Poussin (1594â1665), whom he came to admire and write about. His father was a portrait painter and his great-grandfather on his fatherâs side, Isaac Strauss (born in Strasbourg in 1808), was a violinist, composer and conductor who worked with Berlioz and Offenbach.
In 1914, when the Great War broke out and his father was conscripted, LĂ©vi-Strauss went to live with his mother and her sisters in the house of his maternal grandfather, the chief rabbi of Versailles.
He studied law, then sat the agrégation in philosophy, which he taught in a secondary school (a subject still taught in French secondary schools today) until 1935.
Among those preparing for the agrĂ©gation at the same time as LĂ©vi-Strauss were Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908â61) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908â86). French philosophy at the time was marked by its neo-Kantianism, and many traces of the thought of the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724â1804) can be found in LĂ©vi-Straussâs work.
In 1935, disillusioned with philosophy, LĂ©vi-Strauss accepted an offer to become a lecturer in sociology at the University of SĂŁo Paulo in Brazil.
This was his first encounter with the Bororo and the Caduveo whose unique mode of artistic expression â a complex form of body painting â he later analyzed in great detail.
âI thought I was re-living the adventures of the first explorers of the 16th century. I was once again discovering, but with my own eyes, the New World. Everything seemed fantastic to me: the landscapes, the animals, the plants.â [CL-S]
It was during a later expedition in 1938 that LĂ©vi-Strauss carried out field research among the Nambikwara, a semi-nomadic group with whom he lived for several months.
LĂ©vi-Strauss had discovered the ânoble savagesâ celebrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712â78) and other 18th century Enlightenment philosophers.
After these two trips, however, LĂ©vi-Strauss was soon to discover that he was more suited for the work of the cabinet anthropologist (ethnology) than for field work (ethnography).
It was in the New York public library in 1943 that LĂ©vi-Strauss, then a Jewish refugee who had fled the German invasion of France, began work on what became his doctoral thesis and first book: The Elementary Structures of Kinship. This work revolutionized the anthropological study of kinship systems and established his reputation among professional anthropologists.
It was also at this time that LĂ©vi-Strauss began to discover primitive art â not in ethnographic museums, but in the windows of New York antique dealers.