Fascinating witness to a troubled century

BIOGRAPHY: AENGUS WOODSreviews Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the LaboratoryBy Patrick Wilcken Bloomsbury, 375pp. £30

ON NOVEMBER 28th, 2008, France celebrated the 100th birthday of an anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Remarkably, the man himself was still alive to witness the celebrations, which included a full day's television programming devoted to his work, free admission to the Musée du Quai Branly and a personal visit from the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy. The events were noted worldwide, with newspapers, the New York Timesin particular, running lengthy features.

All in all it constituted a considerably expansive and very public acknowledgment of a figure whose name might not be altogether familiar here and who is probably best known, if known at all, for elaborate ideas about myth and religion. But the celebration did attest to his undeniable cultural significance, and it harked back to an era when it seemed possible that academics and social scientists might have relevance and attraction for a general readership: the decades of Sartre, de Beauvoir and Lacan. Less than a year later Lévi-Strauss had passed away, and so disappeared probably the last prominent figure of that time and a fascinating witness to a troubled century.

Claude Lévi-Strauss came from a family of modest means, studied law and philosophy and as a young man worked as a secondary-school teacher. In search of a more fulfilling career he became interested in ethnography and the burgeoning study of indigenous cultures. By coincidence a university teaching job in São Paulo presented itself, and Lévi-Strauss seized the opportunity to travel to Brazil and undertake his own research among its native people. So began his first and only experience of fieldwork, the core procedure for anthropological study, as he stayed in Brazil for four years, undertaking two expeditions into Mata Grosso and the Amazon rainforest, the first lasting just a few days, the second lasting eight months.

From these formative experiences Lévi-Strauss would produce a vast number of studies into kinship, myth and taboos, as well as writing his celebrated travelogue Tristes Tropiques, a hugely popular elegy for a world vanishing under the weight of modernity. The 1955 jury of the Prix Goncourt famously indicated they would have given him the award if only the book had been a work of fiction.

Leaving Brazil, Lévi-Strauss returned to a France coming face to face with fascism; in 1941, after a spell in the French army, he set sail for the US in the company of André Breton and other French Jews under threat from the new regime. In New York Lévi-Strauss taught at the New School for Social Research and served as cultural attache to the French embassy.

It was here that he encountered the work of Roman Jakobson, whose ideas on the structural basis of language would profoundly influence him. Undertaking vast amounts of comparative research into cultures, Lévi-Strauss absorbed Jakobson’s notion that “language consisted of a formal system of interrelated elements, and that meaning resided not in the elements themselves, but in their relationships to one another”, and used this to decipher the meaning of myths and cultural practices from all over the world.

It allowed him to draw connections between numerous groups of people previously thought unrelated and to challenge the manner in which anthropology, with its tendency to focus on single groups, had hitherto been conducted. The systematicity and wide reach of this work was groundbreaking at the time, and upon Lévi-Strauss’s return to France in 1948 he began his inexorable climb to the highest echelons of the French intellectual scene.

Patrick Wilckens’s biography of Lévi-Strauss fleshes out this story with considerable panache. Equally at ease with the mechanics of structuralist theories as he is with the life story, Wilckens paints a picture of an omnivorous mind with a remarkable ability to synthesise information but also with a tendency to reduce living people to dry abstractions. However, he subtly demonstrates that this was something of an antidote to the prevailing existentialist insistence on the free, tragically heroic individual.

He also draws intriguing parallels between Lévi-Strauss’s work and the kind of impulses animating modernist art and music, with their emphases on abstraction and non-linear forms of organisation.

However, the strongest impression of Lévi-Strauss with which the reader is left is that of a figure somehow both of and apart from his times. A critic of colonialism and racism, he was nevertheless at odds with the prevailing humanism that was so much a part of European liberal values of the time. His vision was altogether bleaker, seeing in the creeping influence of western culture something akin to a virus. In Tristes Tropiqueshe notes with a sense of despair that can only be heightened for today's readers by concerns over global warming that "the first thing thing we see when we travel around the world is our own filth, thrown in the face of humanity".

Wilckens’s subtitle suggests that Lévi-Strauss’s was an ultimately artistic sensibility that found expression in ethnographic writings, bringing the aesthete’s eye to the bricolage of human culture. This seems appropriate, but it is only one among many reasons for finding the work and the life compelling. Lévi-Strauss believed that a patient attention to cultural differences and variations could ultimately reveal something about the structure of reality. Such an endeavour is now more associated with science and its complex subdivisions into an unfamiliar world of quarks and neurons. But in Levi-Strauss’s life and writings we see the tantalising remnants of a time when a solitary mind, rather than a microscope, might penetrate the depths.

Aengus Woods is co-editor of Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey. He is completing a PhD in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York