FRANCE PAID tribute to the father of modern anthropology and structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss, on his 100th birthday yesterday with a host of publications and radio and TV programmes. President Nicolas Sarkozy paid a visit to the aged intellectual's Paris flat.
The Bibliothèque Nationale is exhibiting Lévi-Strauss' manuscripts, and the typewriter on which he wrote Tristes Tropiques (Sad Tropics), the 1955 classic that made him famous. The Musée du quai Branly, France's museum of "first arts" from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, held an admission-free tribute day, staging hourly tours with guides pointing out some of the 1,478 artefacts - feather headdresses, bows, arrows, musical instruments, baskets, sculptures and ceramics - which have belonged to him.
The quai Branly museum's main amphitheatre bears Lévi-Strauss's name, and he attended its inauguration in June 2006. Last year he donated 224 black and white photographs from his 1935-1939 expeditions to Brazil. Many show girls and women from the Caduevo tribe, who painted their faces and bodies with geometric designs.
Some of the Indians he studied spent up to three-quarters of their time decorating themselves.
Lévy-Strauss defines anthropology as "an act of faith in human universality". In Brazil, he studied myths, customs, languages, religion, institutions and laws of kinship among the Caduevo, Bororo, Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib tribes.
In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss later wrote that the prohibition of incest was the foundation of all societies. In another seminal work, Mythologiques, he traced a single myth from the tip of South of America to the Arctic circle.
In his second Brazilian expedition, Lévi-Strauss studied the Nambikwara, whom he described as human society reduced to its simplest expression. These Indians went naked and slept on the ground, without blankets, with families drawing close together for warmth. In his photographs, they are almost always smiling.
Lévi-Strauss recorded his long sojourns with these secluded tribes in Tristes Tropiques. The book begins with the words "I hate travelling", and its first person narrative makes it more accessible than most scientific works. He originally intended it to be a novel. "After 50 pages, I realised I was writing a poor imitation of Conrad," he said. In dire financial straits, he wrote the book at the urging of the Arctic explorer Jean Malaurie "in exasperation and horror, in four months". The book is so well written that the Académie Goncourt issued a statement saying that if Tropiques had been a novel, they would have awarded it the Prix Goncourt.
At the beginning of the second World War, Lévi-Strauss returned from Brazil to France to do his military service. During the 1939-40 "phoney war", as an aimless soldier on the Maginot Line, he had the inspiration that made him the founder of structuralism, the intellectual movement that followed existentialism.
"I was lying in the grass, looking at flowers, in particular a dandelion," Lévy-Strauss recalled. "It was then that I became a structuralist, though I didn't know it yet. I was thinking of the laws of organisation that must have presided over such a complex, harmonious and subtle arrangement, and I could not imagine that it was the result of a series of accidents."
Because Lévi-Strauss, who is Jewish, was not allowed to teach in France under the Vichy régime, he took up a post at the New School for Social Research in New York - probably saving him from the Nazi death camps. In New York, he became a close friend of André Breton and other founding members of surrealism. Lévi-Strauss introduced the surrealists to "primitive" art, and he credited Breton with imparting an understanding of the value of objets d'art.
Two Canadian artefacts which Lévi-Strauss collected during his New York period, a wooden ceremonial head ornament with startling blue eyes, and a sculpture of a shaman or sorcerer (see photo), are particularly noteworthy. Lévi-Strauss had to sell both in 1951, when he returned from New York. The head ornament was sold to a private buyer, and Lévi-Strauss was thrilled to find it in the Musée du quai Branly in 2006.
The 80cm-high shaman had pride of place in the Lévi-Strauss living room, where the children called it "the witch". Lévi-Strauss's son Laurent told Le Monde newspaper that his father was particularly attached to the sculpture, made of wood, leather, copper, fur, bear claws and dogs' teeth.
"He especially liked the fact that it was neither ritual nor decorative. The Indians had made it to sell to passing sailors." The sculpture was bought by the Musée de l'homme in 1951. "My father was upset to lose it. Every Thursday morning, he took me to the museum to visit the witch."
Tristes Tropiques ensured Lévi-Strauss would prosper. From 1959 until 1982, he held the chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France. When he was admitted to the Académie française in 1973, he donned the green velvet habit and plumed Napoleonic hat, joking that it was the least he could do to uphold French rituals, having spent so many years observing the rituals of others. Lévi-Strauss has been awarded more than a dozen honorary doctorates, from universities including Oxford, Harvard and Yale.
Lévi-Strauss has lived long enough to see his theories go out of fashion and come back again. But he often remarks that he feels out of place in an overpopulated world where the very existence of "peoples we wrongly call primitive" is threatened and the environment is being destroyed. "I can't say I feel at ease in the century where I was born," he says. "And the way things are evolving makes me think my descendants will not be any more at ease than I am."