The pope of structuralism

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/11/levi-strauss-writing-thought

High priest of anthropology
Colin MacCabe

Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory
Patrick Wilcken
Bloomsbury, 384pp, £30

Between his own publication of Tristes tro­piques in 1955 and
Jacques Derrida's publication of De la grammatologie in 1967,
Claude Lévi-Strauss bestrode western humanities and social
sciences as no one has before or since. Unlike philosophy or
literary criticism, his discipline, anthropology, was not divided
between "Anglo-Saxon" and "Continental" approaches, and the
promise of a method that would analyse the fundamental processes
of the human mind was initially plausible.

From the beginning, Lévi-Strauss argued two theses, logically
separate but inseparably linked in his own writing. His great idea
- the fruit of a close friendship with Roman Jakobson forged in
wartime exile in New York - was that both myth and kinship were to
be analysed by a functional relationship not to social and
physical reality, but to the most elementary processes of human
thought. The establishment of difference - the distinction between
animals with or without cloven hooves, say - was dictated by the
need to structure the world into pairs of binary oppositions. This
insight built on the greatest discovery of 20th-century
linguistics: rather than analyse the positive features of sound
across an infinite continuum, the Russian linguist Nikolai
Trubetzkoy and his successors had focused simply on the
differences (between "b" and "p", for example) that produced meaning.

Lévi-Strauss claimed to have discovered the fundamental
differences on which all kinship and myth were based, and produced
a simple combination of differential oppositions that, he thought,
underpin even the most complex and apparently dissimilar myths.
Myths were privileged insights into thought, and here his second
thesis came into play: "primitive" societies or, as Lévi-Strauss
termed them, "societies without writing" are more authentic than
societies that have succumbed to writing. Ever since Montaigne,
and receiving its fullest expression in Rousseau's noble savage,
there had been a current in western thought which saw in
"primitive" societies a richer, less alienated relationship
between men and their world than that which obtained in
"civilisation".

Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema
that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all
kinship systems would be conceived as variations on a single
theme, and all myths would operate around a set of basic
differences - and second, a demonstration of the superiority of
forms of thought that came before writing, before the fundamental
alienation that occurred when writing intruded into an authentic
idyll.

However, Lévi-Strauss's dominance of western thought evaporated
after Derrida devoted a 40-page analysis to the anthropologist's
foray into the world of the Nambikwara Amazonians. Derrida showed
that Lévi-Strauss's position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric
model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the
Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before
writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the
way in which any system of language had all the features of a
writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern.
The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship
with his surroundings than the western anthropologist trying to
persuade little girls to break tribal taboos.

Derrida not only demolished Lévi-Strauss's sentimental
valorisation of the Amazonians, but took an axe to his
"scientific" project. Linguistics was based on the discovery of
the phoneme, the basic element of sound difference from which all
meaning in a language flowed. Yet the anthropologist's mythemes
were always the result of interpretation.

Patrick Wilcken's biography barely mentions Derrida, and often
seems somewhat ill at ease in dealing with Lévi-Strauss's
intellectual project, but does succeed in describing the life
behind the work. The picture that emerges is remarkably
unengaging. Lévi-Strauss comes across as an opportunistic
intellectual bureaucrat, always ready to bend the knee to power,
and so uninterested in his own work except as a means of
advancement that, despite building a considerable academic empire,
he left behind no successors or inheritors. He was heavily
dependent on close dialogue - with Jakobson, Georges Du­mézil,
Émile Benveniste and Jacques Lacan - but once his career had taken
off (he was easily the most institutionally successful of all the
structuralists), he seems to have communicated intellectually with
no one. The idiosyncratic analyses of the four-volume
Mytho­logiques, published between 1964 and 1971, emerged from a
life that had been hermetically sealed. He made contact with the
contemporary world only to denounce it: he voted against admitting
women to the Académie Française in 1979.

The most interesting passages in the biography occur early in the
book as Wilcken follows the young Lévi-Strauss to a government
teaching job in Brazil and then on to the expedition that brought
him into contact with the Nambikwara and gave rise to the most
important sections in Tristes tropiques. Wilcken also writes
informatively about the semi-accident that led to Lévi-Strauss
writing this, his best-known work, some 20 years later when,
having failed in his first attempt to be elected to the Collège de
France, he contemplated an alternative career in journalism.
Tristes tropiques not only made Lévi-Strauss an intellectual
cele­brity of a new type, but consolidated the "anthropological
turn" that was the most significant development in the humanities
in the 20th century, as every culture came to be seen as a
potential bearer of meaning.

Colin MacCabe is distinguished professor of English and film at
the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania